• DOI:10.1162/002219502753364263
• Corpus ID: 142217169

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (review)

@article{Weiner2001TheBB,
  title={The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (review)},
  author={Amir Weiner},
  journal={Journal of Interdisciplinary History},
  year={2001},
  volume={32},
  pages={450-452}
}

• A. Weiner
• Published 1 November 2001
• History
• Journal of Interdisciplinary History

burden on their parents. According to the authors, many of the children are not abandoned; they have voluntarily left their parents for personal independence. They should not be rescued so much as empowered. Fair as this argument is, however, it is hard to see how children sold into prostitution by their parents and held as debt slaves can be regarded as free, and empowered as such, although this may be a limiting case. Finally, Heather Montgomery ands another use for the term abandonment. She argues that we should place less blame on parents for abandoning their children than on the states and societies that have abandoned families, driven them from the land and deprived them of their traditional means of earning a livelihood, while providing no adequate means of support in the shanty towns. In these conditions, parents and children have few options and can hardly be blamed for grasping whatever opportunities they can and to survive.