No other historical figure in modern times—except for Putin—has been the object of such unrelenting demonisation as Stalin.
While the Western media and bourgeois academia have no problem rehabilitating the image of international war criminals like George W Bush and his camarilla, or even Hitler, the venom against hardcore communist leaders, or those who oppose the US capitalist empire, remains fierce and unyielding.
The technique of dressing up anti-communist propaganda as 'objective truth' is the stock in trade of all academic departments and professors of 'Soviet Studies.'
Prof. Furr
From George Orwell to Robert Conquest to Solzenytsin, very few people have bothered to check the sources on which they base their sweeping anti-communist 'conclusions'.
Professor Grover Furr, a talented linguist and Historian, with an interest in the USSR, Stalin and the communist movement, has done just that, and it is his evaluation of ALL the sources and ALL the footnotes that allows him to reach an authoritative opinion on the true value of these 'bibles of anti-communism. It turns out that the overwhelmingly reactionary Polish and Ukrainian sources are ALL biased, or outright fabrications.
Professor Furr has evaluated the most prominent sources of the bourgeois anti-communist myths: "The Great Terror" by R. Conquest and "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snider. What's more he has dissected the most prominent "socialist" sources of anti-communist and anti-Stalin myths - those put forward by Khrushchev in his "secret speech" (secret as far as the citizens of the USSR were concerned, but broadcast widely to the imperialists as a symbol of surrender; and to the international communist movement, demoralising and disorganising it most profoundly to this day), that marked the beginning of the revisionist counter-revolution in the USSR, and the ultimate dissolution of Soviet Socialism into 'market Socialism' and then outright counter-revolutionary gangster capitalism.
He has also broken down the anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin lies of Trotsky and the Trotskyites.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Excellent and thank you for this, I had never heard of Mr Furr before, although I have been looking on and off for some time for books about the Stalin period that do NOT begin ‘we know he was a horrible monster, here’s our version of his monster story’ – very, very hard to come by, I will be checking out some of Furr’s books. It’s been pretty clear just from basic ‘facts on the ground’ that there was a lot more to Stalin than we’ve been hearing from ‘official USA (we hate Stalin almost as much as we hate… Read more »
Russians have a good historical opinion of Stalin. According to a Levada Poll, Stalin was chosen the most outstanding leader of the world (not only Russia), followed by Lenin and Stalin.
Thank you Prof. Furr.
I listened in fascination to Professor Grover Furr’s interview with the UK Communist Party and was struck by many familiar chords because I agree with him on his “revisionst” views of Josef Stalin, Old Uncle Joe. I was on familiar territory when he introduced the two Western academic molders of anti-Communist anti-Stalinism: Robert Conquest (The Great Terror) and Timothy Snider (Bloodlines), a close read of either of which alone could make a pro-Stalinist of the most hardline hater of Stalin, both of whom nonetheless laid down the main lines of what successive generations of both Western scholars and average people… Read more »
Elegantly and irrefutably put, and your own record as novelist and essayist dismantling the thick web of lies about communism, the Soviet Union experience and Stalin adds an extra dimension to your commentary. Furr has done a simply titanic job; what real historians (not to mention real journalists) should have done all along, if they had not been busy padding their careers at the foot of the new monster hegemon.