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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DEBORAH ARMSTRONG—“We were clearing the central part of Bakhmut, clearing civilian houses,” an unidentified member of Wagner said. “The civilians started running out of the basement. They said there were children in the basement. There was an 11-year-old child, a little girl, frightened. During the evacuation, they opened fire on us and a sniper was shooting at us. It was not in our direction, but directed at the little girl. During the evacuation we had to cover her with flak jackets, but she survived and was taken away.
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JIM KAVANAGH—The accumulation of ludicrous moves by the United States and its pawns over the past few months has reached a stage that would be risible if it were not so dangerous. The danger is exacerbated by the insistence of American media on, first, ignoring the most provocative and reckless moves, then proposing explanations for them that can’t withstand three minutes of critical thought. The object is to keep the American public ignorant, make it stupid, and maintain the national-security state’s prerogative to do anything it wants.
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MAX PARRY—Although he was at one point an early member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and helped compose its constitution, Dugin is certainly no longer a communist and far from it. But before one delves into his work, it is important to understand that his controversial views developed at a major turning point in Russian history where an ideological vacuum opened amid the collapse of the Soviet Union with the introduction of extreme free market capitalism in the early 1990s.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Contrary to U.S.-and-allied propagandists, that war in Ukraine wasn’t started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but back in February 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had started by no later than June of 2011 to plan, and by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S.’s Ukrainian Embassy to execute the plan, and then on 20 February 2014 to culminate the U.S. coup that overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist President, and replaced him and his Government with the U.S. selected leaders of the new, and rabidly Russia-hating, U.S.-controlled, Ukrainian regime.
