共產主義黑皮書

Critics of the Black Book have alleged that it uses the umbrella term "communism" to refer to a wide variety of different systems, and that it "arbitrarily throws together completely different historical phenomena such as the civil war of 1918-21, the forced collectivisation and the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the rule of Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia, the military government of Ethiopia as well as various Latin American political movements, from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the 'Shining Path' in Peru."While not necessarily disputing the communist nature of the aforementioned countries, the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique has argued that local history and traditions played a role at least as important as the role of communism in each case.

A number of critics argue that some or all of the regimes mentioned in the book were not, in fact, "communist". This is not a new idea: the question of whether the historical communist states represented an accurate implementation of communist ideas into practice has been open since the 1930s. In the introduction to the Black Book, Stéphane Courtois claims that "there will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism."(p. 2) He does not elaborate on this point, and, for the purpose of the book, a communist state is defined as a one-party state where the ruling party openly proclaims its adherence to Marxism-Leninism. The Black Book does not attempt to judge whether such ruling parties were honest in their self-description as "communist".