One of the purposes of the article is to provide a synthesis of the history of the Black Book, a volume on the extermination of Soviet Jews by the Nazis, edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman. This consideration includes its lesser known and its more recent editions (like the 2015 Russian edition published by AST Corpus). The history of the Black Book is approached from three different perspectives : the relations between the state and the Jews in the Soviet Union, the interactions between the Soviet Union and the West, and the connections between the history of Soviet politics and the memory of the genocide of the Jews. These frameworks are crucial for the understanding of the complex and tormented history of this text that was never published in the Soviet Union itself. This analysis aims above all to offer, through the history of the Black Book, a reflection on the place of the memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia.