Professor Stéphane Courtois
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) was proud to present the 2024 Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom to Professor Stéphane Courtois, renowned historian and co-author of the Black Book of Communism.
“It is a true honor to award Professor Courtois the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, our institute’s highest accolade,” said Dr. Eric Patterson, President and CEO of VOC. “Professor Courtois’ lifelong scholarly commitment to exposing the crimes of Marxism has fundamentally shaped the free world’s understanding of communism not just as abhorrent and oppressive, but as the deadliest ideology the world has ever known.”
Born in France in 1947, Courtois was indoctrinated into the Maoist Marxist–Leninist movement, working with the Vive Communism organization at an early age. Upon realizing the false promise of Marxism, however, Courtois quickly became one of the preeminent scholars of communism as the ideology began sweeping across the world.
His magnum opus, The Black Book of Communism, is the authoritative scholarly publication on the crimes of communism. Working with a team of scholars after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc regimes, Courtois spent thousands of hours scouring the recently opened archives to reveal the “actual, practical accomplishments of communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres.” Working with the regime’s own evidence, the book became an international bestseller, as it was the first peer-reviewed attempt to catalog and analyze the crimes of communism. It resulted in an astonishing and harrowing discovery—100 million people killed by communist regimes around the world.
Today, Professor Courtois continues tirelessly to shed light on the crimes of communism through his work as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He remains a steadfast advocate for the victims of communism.
