crucial facts. In this respect, some of his critics were not wrong. First, as an expansionist global phenomenon, Communism lasted between 1917 and the time of the completion of The Black Book (think of North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, where it is still alive, if not well). [Nazism] lasted between 1933 and 1945. Second, we simply do not know what the price in terms of victims of Nazism would have been had Hitler won the war. The logical hypothesis is that not only Jews and Gypsies but also millions of Slavs and other 'racially unfit' individuals would have been destined to death." Comparison of communism and Nazism On 12 November 1997, the then-Prime Minister of France and Socialist Lionel Jospin responded to the book's claims and declared to the National Assembly that "the Revolution of 1917 was one of the great events of the century. ... And if the [French Communist Party (PCF)] had taken so long to denounce Stalinism, it had done so anyway." Jospin added that "the PCF had learned the lessons from its history. It is represented in my government and I'm proud of it." In a 21 November 1997 interview with Die Zeit, Courtois stated: "In my opinion, there is nothing exceptional about the Nazi genocide against the Jews." Historian Amir Weiner wrote: "The comparison with Nazism is inevitable. It is merited on the grounds of the mutual commitment to social engineering through violent means; the ensuing demographic, psychological, and ethical implications; and, not least, the fact that both systems constantly scrutinized one another. Unfortunately, the authors of the Black Book reduce the comparison to body counting, charging communists with killing nearly 100 million people and the Nazis, 25 million. At best, this approach is ahistorical and demeaning." Many observers have rejected Courtois' numerical and moral comparison of communism to Nazism in the introduction, the claim made in the book that "a lot of what they describe 'crimes, terror, and repression' has somehow been kept from the general public", According to Werth, there was still a qualitative difference between communism and Nazism, stating: "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union." On 21 September 2000, Werth further told Le Monde: "The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious." Weiner wrote that "[w]hen Stalin's successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the