[3] Courtois' attempt to equate the two has been polemically effective, but controversial due to his numbers and his choice of which countries and events to compare, as well as being revisionist.

As a student, from 1968 to 1971, Courtois was a Maoist, but he later became a strong supporter of democracy, pluralism, human rights,[clarification needed] and the rule of law.

[8] Courtois served as the historical consultant on the controversial 1985 documentary Des terroristes à la retraite, which alleged a conspiracy by the PCF leadership to betray the FTP-MOI resistance group to the French police in 1943.

In the 1989 book Le sang de l'étranger − les immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance co-written with Adam Rayski and Denis Peschanski, Courtois cleared Holban of the allegation that he was a police informer and concluded that it was "brutally efficient police work" by the Brigades spéciales that led to the mass arrests of the FTP-MOI members in November 1943.

[12] Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and of the "Iron Curtain", the Soviet Union broke up in December 1991, the archives of the Comintern were opened not only to Russian historians but also to western researchers.

[15] Courtois gleaned some spectacular information from the archives and in deliberately provoking controversy, which led in the eyes of some at the Communisme journal to a divisive position with the complementary scientific researches there.

[8] If the historiographic production of Courtois before 1995 mainly concerned the PCF, afterward, it focused more on the Comintern and the history of communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

In his book on Eugen Fried, which he cowrote with Annie Kriegel in 1997, the emphasis was more on the control by the Comintern on the national communist parties and the mass anti-fascist organizations such as Amsterdam-Pleyel, Secours Rouge, and the Universal Gathering for peace.

They made several trips to the Russian capital and brought back thousands of pages on microfilm...."[16] In a communication to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Courtois defended the thesis that Stalin was perfectly representative of the Soviet regime introduced in the 1917 Revolution led by Lenin, stating: "The fact remains that in the foundation phase of the system, from 1917 to 1953, it was the ideology that dictated the conduct of Lenin and then of Stalin.... Stalin was an authentic Bolshevik — pupil of the school of Leninism.... Stalin was not the obscure apparatchik described by Trotsky, but one of the direct collaborators of Lenin and among the most appreciated for his unwavering support of the leader, his sense of discipline, his composure and exceptional firmness of character, his determination, and his total lack of scruples or compassion in his actions".

[13] The methodology, developed by her and adopted by him, consisted of an accumulation of stages of thought of the researcher in the form of texts that are grouped by topic and published regularly.

Also participating in this work were Nicolas Werth (professor of history and a researcher at the Institute of Modern History (IHTP) where he specialises in the Soviet Union), Jean-Louis Panné (historian and editor at Gallimard, also the author of a biography of Boris Souvarine), Karel Bartosek (researcher at CNRS and editor of the journal New Alternative), Andrzej Paczkowski (Professor of Political Science and member of the board of the archives for the Ministry of Interior).

How to calculate in an unbiased fashion the numbers of disparate victims who died in civil wars, economic crises or even common criminals on five continents by various regimes for more than 70 years, was also discussed.

[24] Some writers and commentators were surprised that Courtois made the comparison with Nazism a theme of part of the preface, when no contributions referred to the question.

Courtois raised the comparison between Nazism and Communism as an issue to be dealt with by historians and called for the establishment of an equivalent of the Nuremberg tribunal to try those Communists responsible.

[25] For its supporters, Communism was a humanist and egalitarian ideology unlike Nazism and many historians, starting with some authors of the book, expressed their disagreement with Courtois.

He also cites François Furet, who would have written the foreword had he not died prematurely, who said that the Genocide of Jews had "the awful distinction of being an end in itself".

The journalist Benoît Rayski accused some intellectuals, including Stéphane Courtois, Alain Besançon, Ernst Nolte and Jean-François Revel, of wanting to confound the West about the issue of Nazism to promote their own anticommunism.

[34] In his speech at the Summer University at Sighet entitled "The Lost Honour of the European Left," Courtois denounced the rejection by more than two-thirds of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of a Resolution and a "Recommendation concerning the condemnation of crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes", 25 January 2007.

Intellectually pro-American,[42] he believes in his famous speech to the UN, Dominique de Villepin was a victim of reactions from Soviet propaganda in France.

[44] Stéphane Courtois supported the author Gerard Chauvy in the trial that determined part of a biography of the French Resistance leaders Raymond and Lucie Aubrac was public defamation.

[45][46][47] François Delpla believed that in the context of this case, "the desire to finish with communism" had been lost on Courtois to the extent that he was running with the wolves against Aubrac, during a campaign questioning the quality of the resistance.

The historian Jean-Jacques Becker believed that his research was sensationalist in nature: "This is a fighter who wants to make history effective, that is to say exactly the opposite of history….

(republished on the website of the historical journal Arkheia[50]) in which he publicly accused the French historian, 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,[citation needed] and many years later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1973 in The Gulag Archipelago.

[52][53][54] In 2009, he criticized the Trotskyist 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).

[13] 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 Russian 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".

[13] 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.

[59] In 2000, Kommunismi must Raamat the Estonian version of the Black Book of Communism received political support by being prefaced by the President of Estonia Lennart Meri.

At the same time, the Prime Minister Mart Laar participated in this collective work by signing an additional chapter of 80 pages "Estonia and Communism" ("Eesti ja kommunism").

He was awarded the honorary title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Free International University of Moldova (ULIM), in Chisinau, on 8 July 2011.