He gives the number of Bolsheviks in October 1917 as 2,000, which is a ridiculous underestimate. He quotes from a letter of Lenin to Alexander Shliapnikov and gives the date as 17 October 1917; the letter could hardly have originated at that time, since in it Lenin talks about the need to defeat the Tsarist government, and turn the war into a civil conflict. He gives credit to the Austro-Hungarian rather than the German army for the conquest of Poland in 1915. He describes the Provisional Government as 'elected'. He incorrectly writes that the peasant rebels during the civil war did more harm to the Reds than to the Whites, and so on." Historian Michael Ellman stated that the book's estimate of "at least 500,000" deaths during the Soviet famine of 1946–1947 "is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger", with 1,000,000–1,500,000 excess deaths. Historians such as Hiroaki Kuromiya and Mark Tauger challenged the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was largely artificial and genocidal. According to journalist Gilles Perrault, the book ignores the effect of international factors, including military interventions, invasions, sanctions, and coups, on the Communist experience. Historian Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger, which revealed that while India's democratic institutions largely prevented famines, its excess of preventable mortality over China, potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and social resources, was nonetheless close to 4 million people per year for non-famine years. Chomsky wrote that "Supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book to India, the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of Communism everywhere since 1917. Over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone." Economist Tim Worstall disputes this premise, stating "The error there - and one that Sen would laugh at - is to think that post-independence India was in any manner a capitalist economy. Quite famously it wasn't, in fact it was the one place that the fantasies of Fabian Socialism were enacted for any substantial number of decades." Le Siècle des communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and Stéphane Courtois' The Black Book of Communism. It broke communism down into series of