GROVER FURR—n the January – February 2023 issue of Current Affairs there appears an article titled “Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable/” Its subtitle reads: Stalin was socialism’s worst enemy. History is easily forgotten, so nostalgia for the “Man of Steel” needs to be guarded against. A person who knows of my long interest in Joseph Stalin and the “Stalin years” of Soviet history alerted me to this article when it appeared online. He wondered what my response to Skopic’s accusations against Stalin might be.
I have been studying the Stalin period of Soviet history for many years now I decided to write a response to Skopic’s article because it is a brief compendium of many of the allegations made against Stalin not only by overtly pro-capitalist and anticommunist writers, but by persons who are, or wish to be, or think that they are, on the anti-capitalist Left.
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ANDRE VLTCHEK—If you drive towards Petra and then Aqaba, it is all desert and misery, villages covered with dust and poverty on roughly the Yemeni level. You drive towards Syria and it is approximately the same: miserable towns, military airports and refugee camps.
But back in Amman, it is 8 of what is called ‘5-star malls’, while several new ones are being built. The country is totally grotesque, but it is actually not something unique – just a condensed reality of the Middle East, or at least of the client states of the West in this part of the world.
