"Khrushchev Lied" by Grover Furr (Bestseller in Russia, now in English)

[DiaMat86]

http://www.erythrospress.com/store/furr.html

The Evidence That Every “Revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False

In his “Secret Speech” of February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev accused Joseph Stalin of immense crimes. Khrushchev’s speech was a body blow from which the worldwide communist movement never recovered. It changed the course of history.

Grover Furr has spent a decade studying the flood of documents from formerly secret Soviet archives published since the end of the USSR. In this detailed study of Khrushchev's speech he reveals the astonishing results of his research: Not a single one of Khrushchev's "revelations" is true!

The most influential speech of the 20th century—if not of all time—a dishonest swindle? The very thought is monstrous; the implications for our understanding of Left history—immense. Basing their work on Khrushchev’s lies, Soviet and Western historians, including Trotskyists and anticommunists, have effectively falsified Soviet history.

Virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong. The history of the USSR, and of the communist movement of the 20th century, must be completely rewritten.


Reviews and Comments on Khrushchev Lied


“Khrushchev Lied is a marvelous piece of work, formidable in its research and reasoning, clear and precise in its writing, and breathtaking in its findings and implications. Revisiting old sources and using new material from the Soviet archives, Grover Furr's study demands a complete rethinking of Soviet history, socialist history, indeed world history of the 20th century.”

- Roger Keeran, Empire State College, co-author of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.


“Grover Furr has performed a valuable service to the field of Soviet studies by grappling in depth with Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956. … While some of the charges Khrushchev made have long been rejected in the West and in Russia, for example the idea that secret police chief Lavrenty Beria was a foreign agent, many other points Grover Furr raises are new and worthy of a great deal more attention.”

- Robert W. Thurston, Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History, Miami University; author of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941.


“Grover Furr has written an intriguing book that challenges much of the existing historiography of the Stalinist 1930s. His insights and the sources he brings to bear question many of the views held by historians for decades and deserve our consideration. This book raises issues and questions that most scholars in the West today would not and does so in a sober and penetrating manner. He reaches fascinating conclusions, debunking much of what we thought we knew about the Stalinist era. … The translation of this pathbreaking work, which has already made quite a splash in Russia’s academic circles, into English is long overdue.”

- Jeff Jones, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; author of Everyday Life and the "Reconstruction" of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943-1948.

[Red_Struggle]

oh yeah, I came across this a few days ago. I plan to order a copy soon.

[Kléber]

Khrushchev did lie about some things, namely his own role in the Stalinist purges, but he was a lot more honest than your average Soviet bureaucrat.

Furr is really a disgrace to the academic left, he makes progressives look like idiots by demanding that history be "completely rewritten" (revisionism anyone?) to erase any mention of repressions in the USSR during 1930's.

[gorillafuck]

Basing their work on Khrushchev’s lies, Soviet and Western historians, including Trotskyists and anticommunists,Lol.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

On Grover Furr's website (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/):




07.15.2008 - A fine recommendation for my book in an article by Leonid Zhura in IUrii Mukhin's journal Duel': (http://www.duel.ru/200829/?29_4_1)




"One does not require archival research in order to refute the slanders of the illiterate Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress concerning the supposed 'cult of personality of Stalin' and 'unfounded repressions' ... Grover Furr, in his book 'Antistalinskaia Podlost'', has exposed this personage especially well."




Ah, wonderful. The nationalist Duel is a rag that was banned in 2009 for inciting anti-Semitism.

And the journal publisher whose name is transliterated on Furr's website as "IUrii Mukhin" is this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Ignatyevich_Mukhin.

[Red_Struggle]

Khrushchev did lie about some things, namely his own role in the Stalinist purges, but he was a lot more honest than your average Soviet bureaucrat.


I knew it would be only a matter of time until someone (either you or "red" dave) showed up.


On Grover Furr's website (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/):



Ah, wonderful. The nationalist Duel is a rag that was banned in 2009 for inciting anti-Semitism.

Some who contribute to the magazine are nationalists. Some of the Russian extreme right defend Stalin on nationalist grounds, others despise him. But what's your point?

[Woland]

On Grover Furr's website (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/):



Ah, wonderful. The nationalist Duel is a rag that was banned in 2009 for inciting anti-Semitism.

And the journal publisher whose name is transliterated on Furr's website as "IUrii Mukhin" is this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Ignatyevich_Mukhin.

Have you ever even read an issue of Duel'? Obviously not. I've read a couple of hundred of its issues, and it's actually a rather good newspaper - and it's not nationalist per se - sometimes nationalists have their articles there, sometimes it's liberal democrats, but it's mostly communists - and Mukhin is openly a communist, and an anti-zionist. And no, it was not banned because of ''anti-Semitism'' but for publishing an article that was deemed extremist (the name of the article in question was ''Death to Russia!'' - for me, that doesn't sound very ultranationalist, but okay).

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Have you ever even read an issue of Duel'? Obviously not. I've read a couple of hundred of its issues, and it's actually a rather good newspaper - and it's not nationalist per se - sometimes nationalists have their articles there, sometimes it's liberal democrats, but it's mostly communists - and Mukhin is openly a communist, and an anti-zionist. And no, it was not banned because of ''anti-Semitism'' but for publishing an article that was deemed extremist (the name of the article in question was ''Death to Russia!'' - for me, that doesn't sound very ultranationalist, but okay).

I don't remember the article in question, since I last visited in 2009. It's possible that I mixed something up, but what I do remember was the front page of the website issuing a forced retraction for some anti-Semitic crap, which I found funny, given the pretty serious nationalism that pervades Russian political arena, including much of the so-called "left."

As for Duel being anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic, here's a link to a Duel translation -- "The Myth of the Holocaust" by Swiss Holocaust denier Jurgen Graf (living in Moscow): http://www.duel.ru/199719/?19_5_2. I guess Furr isn't the only person Mukhin promotes.

[RED DAVE]

I knew it would be only a matter of time until someone (either you or "red" dave) showed up.Some pathetic apologist for stalinism call me? :D

RED DAVE

[Wanted Man]

"One does not require archival research in order to refute the slanders of the illiterate Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress concerning the supposed 'cult of personality of Stalin' and 'unfounded repressions' ... Grover Furr, in his book 'Antistalinskaia Podlost'', has exposed this personage especially well."

Surely, archival research can be pretty useful when you want to make that kind of judgement... With all due respect, I wonder whether the work of Mr Furr is the best we can come up with with regards to Stalin.

[Woland]

As for Duel being anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic, here's a link to a Duel translation -- "The Myth of the Holocaust" by Swiss Holocaust denier Jurgen Graf (living in Moscow): http://www.duel.ru/199719/?19_5_2

I once again stress that Duel' has articles from virtually every political group that opposes the current Russian government. They published his article, yes, but it does not mean they support it - some readers certainly do, though. The reason I like Duel' is because sometimes they have some very good articles from some very good authors - and sometimes they have things there I don't agree with at all, such as this article.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

I once again stress that Duel' has articles from virtually every political group that opposes the current Russian government. They published his article, yes, but it does not mean they support it - some readers certainly do, though. The reason I like Duel' is because sometimes they have some very good articles from some very good authors - and sometimes they have things there I don't agree with at all, such as this article.

You are a finer joker, Woland.

Here is a Holocaust denial article -- also in Duel, penned by Mukhin himself: http://www.lebed.com/1997/art235.htm

[Jose Gracchus]

One imagines how they would react, if a journal of identical ideological content to this one Furr's (and more generally, Stalin's) cock-gobblers will rush to defend, had been publishing Trotsky's articles in the 1930s, or one of their beloved 'anti-imperialist' states. I am, of course, being rhetorical; the excuse consistently used when you cite sources that you are "siding" with pro-Nazi, pro-capitalist sentiments and goals.

I wonder how they feel snuggling up to this ilk trying to shake off the shame (still!) of the Secret Speech.

[DiaMat86]

No body has come forward in RUSSIA to dispute Furr's book. It has been out for years. What do you know?

All you have against Furr is Ad Hominem. Or the other fallacy, guilt by association. His work is so solid you can't dispute it with reason.

We need someone better than Furr you say?? Step right up!

[Jose Gracchus]

That's not what I said. I said if in the case of an association like that, you would refuse to read anything by a Trotskyist or other "anticommunists". I certainly did not mean to suggest your reasoning to behave like that was valid in this case. I think it is worth reading to refute, I just haven't the time yet I'm afraid. I meant only to imply many among your tendency's inveterate hypocrisy.

[DiaMat86]

To assist your research, Furr had most of the source material translated by a third party. Now the real archival documents can be reviewed. His stuff is thorough.

My tendency? I am not a Stalinist. Stalin believed that socialism leads to communism. History shows it does not. Socialism is the system between capitalism and capitalism. Socialism is a system of wages and privileges. Such things are not readily relinquished by those in power. Humanity must overthrow socialism especially as it exists today.

Furr's book is about Soviet history not "Stalinism". We need to know what happened in the Soviet Union to avoid the mistakes of the past.

There is ample evidence Trotsky collaborated with the Japanese and the Nazis when he was on the lam. He definitely collaborated with the Dewey Commission. There are big gaps in Trotsky's personal archive but not in the Soviet Union's. This information will be published.

Stop feeding the "two cults" iconography.

[Jose Gracchus]

If Stalinist construction of socialism was deviation toward capitalism, and Trotsky was also a scab, then isn't the entire "who was right in the 20s and 30s????" debate academic? Ditto for 1956? Isn't this just corrupt people with bad politics squabbling with nothing to do with workers?

What does it matter? Seems like a peculiar thing for Furr and the PLP to spend time on.

[KC]

I'd be interested in reading any serious historian's review of this book. I have yet to find any, which usually tells me that it's so far out there that most historians are not willing to waste their time on it (then again, I'm open to be proven wrong).

[Fungy]

One imagines how they would react, if a journal of identical ideological content to this one Furr's (and more generally, Stalin's) cock-gobblers will rush to defend, had been publishing Trotsky's articles in the 1930s, or one of their beloved 'anti-imperialist' states. I am, of course, being rhetorical; the excuse consistently used when you cite sources that you are "siding" with pro-Nazi, pro-capitalist sentiments and goals.

Whatever are you babbling incoherently about? The pro-Hitler English press (Lord Beaverbrock, Lord Rothsmere, and William Randolf Hearst) was the first one to give Trotsky a warm welcome, and paid him a fortune for his work.

[Ismail]

I'd be interested in reading any serious historian's review of this book. I have yet to find any, which usually tells me that it's so far out there that most historians are not willing to waste their time on it (then again, I'm open to be proven wrong).Considering that the book came out about two days ago that seems a tad premature.

Besides, name a "serious historian." You'll wind up with either reactionaries like Robert Conquest and other kneejerk types, or "revisionist" historians like Getty, Fitzpatrick, Manning, etc. who are generally quite eager to distance themselves from anything seen as sympathetic to Stalin. Manning (who it is said is ex-CPUSA) called Thurston a "Stalin apologist," and Thurston's book wasn't even praising Stalin.

[Fungy]

I'd be interested in reading any serious historian's review of this book. I have yet to find any, which usually tells me that it's so far out there that most historians are not willing to waste their time on it (then again, I'm open to be proven wrong).

Robert Thurston is serious as a heart-attack, and had published a book with Yale University Press, and got several papers published in Slavic Review. I'm surprised Furr got Thurston to step out on a limb like that. I think, the only reason he probably agreed to, is that Thurston was basically run out of the field awhile back, and no longer writes anything for it. Maybe this is his way of sticking his finger in the eye of the anti-communist establishment.

Can you imagine: spending all that, getting a PhD in the field, and becoming so disgusted with it, you switch to writing about coffee...and witch hunts...

Roger Keeran is excellent too, though like Furr, is actually pretty open abou this politics.

[Ismail]

Khrushchev did lie about some things, namely his own role in the Stalinist purges, but he was a lot more honest than your average Soviet bureaucrat.From what I've read of his memoirs he basically just acted like a bitter rightist. His "Secret Speech" is full of falsifications, like the claim that Stalin "planned [military] operations on a globe," which Zhukov noted was bull.

[Kléber]

My tendency? I am not a Stalinist. Stalin believed that socialism leads to communism. History shows it does not. Socialism is the system between capitalism and capitalism. Socialism is a system of wages and privileges. Such things are not readily relinquished by those in power. Humanity must overthrow socialism especially as it exists today.
As Marx, Engels and Lenin used the term, socialism means the first stage of communism. Stalin's regime revised the definition of socialism to mean a bureaucratic dictatorship over the working people, with huge pay bonuses and privileges for the elite. The PLP, it seems, has rejected the fundamentals of Marxism while upholding the biggest lie of Stalinism.


There is ample evidence Trotsky collaborated with the Japanese and the Nazis when he was on the lam. He definitely collaborated with the Dewey Commission. There are big gaps in Trotsky's personal archive but not in the Soviet Union's. This information will be published. There is no evidence that Trotsky collaborated with imperialism. Furr's only "evidence" is not evidence at all, any more than there is "evidence" for the existence of god. It's just speculation about why Trotsky's personal archives aren't complete. Those are archives which were frequently seized and looted, first by Stalinist agents in the USSR, then by bourgeois governments as Trotsky was exiled from one capitalist country after another like the revolutionary Karl Marx. Trotsky's archives were also pilfered and looted by GPU infiltrators in the Fourth International. It's a wonder he made it to Mexico alive, let alone with some kind of archive. Stalin and Mao, by comparison, were practically emperors living in palaces - but their "archives" are a joke, I'd even call them the very definition of evasiveness and political cowardice.

There is overwhelming and indisputable evidence that Stalin's bureaucracy not only prostrated itself before every imperialism imaginable, but made an alliance in all but name with Nazi Germany from 1939-41. That alliance consisted of political support, trade agreements, international abandonment of anti-fascist struggle by official Communist Parties, direct Red Army-Wehrmacht collaboration in the 1939 Partition of Poland, and direct NKVD-Gestapo collaboration against Polish resistance and even some prisoner transfers between Stalinist gulag and Nazi concentration camp systems. It is also a known fact that the PRC under Mao Zedong entered a tacit alliance with US imperialism and began to arm reactionary comprador governments while Vietnam was still being bombed by the imperialists.


Whatever are you babbling incoherently about? The pro-Hitler English press (Lord Beaverbrock, Lord Rothsmere, and William Randolf Hearst) was the first one to give Trotsky a warm welcome, and paid him a fortune for his work.
That's total bullshit. The capitalists kicked Trotsky out of Europe precisely because of his anti-imperialist defiance; in fact they were on the verge of deporting him back to the Soviet Union, where the Stalinist traitors would have shot him immediately. The only bourgeois leader to help Trotsky was the one who probably saved his life, and he was no imperialist: President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico.


From what I've read of his memoirs he basically just acted like a bitter rightist. His "Secret Speech" is full of falsifications, like the claim that Stalin "planned [military] operations on a globe," which Zhukov noted was bull.
He acted as an agent of the bureaucracy attempting to restore its credibility among the Soviet people. A few hyperbolic jibes at his hated predecessor and former master were necessary as a sort of shock factor, to establish his reputation as an "anti-Stalinist" when he had in fact signed off on death warrants and condemned tens of thousands of comrades to death during late 1930's. In Khrushchev's memoirs, glaring criticisms of Stalin exist alongside glowing acknowledgments of the guy as his political mentor.

[Ismail]

This thread should be focused on the "Secret Speech" and Khrushchev's views on Stalin. As for other things, I'll just bother to point out that it appears Glenn Beck, the editors of The Soviet Story (http://www.revleft.com/vb/www.historyfoundation.ru/dl.php?file=73) and super Stalin-hater (to use a Furr term) Kléber have come together to agree that the USSR and Germany were allied with each other and that the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty wasn't the result of anti-communists in Britain and France refusing to ally (http://leninist.biz/en/0000/ALS00000/SE128.06-The.Fight.For.Peace.Fails) with the USSR and in fact encouraging the Nazis to move eastwards.


In Khrushchev's memoirs, glaring criticisms of Stalin exist alongside glowing acknowledgments of the guy as his political mentor.In what way? Give some examples outside of "oh, we all grew up under Stalin."

[Fungy]

That's total bullshit. The capitalists kicked Trotsky out of Europe precisely because of his anti-imperialist defiance; in fact they were on the verge of deporting him back to the Soviet Union, where the Stalinist traitors would have shot him immediately. The only bourgeois leader to help Trotsky was the one who probably saved his life, and he was no imperialist: President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico.

It appears, like most Trotskyites, you have a problem with even reading statements that disagree with your preconceived notion of your cult-God's nobility.

To quote Volkogonov's Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary:


"He received $10,000 for his first articles for the Daily Express, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and other newspapers. Soon he would receive an advance of $7,000 from an American publisher for his autobiography, and for a series of articles entitled 'The History of the Russian Revolution' the Saturday Evening Post paid him $45,000.

The Daily Express was Lord Beaverbrook's paper. This sum, adjusted for today's dollars, is well over $800,000, and this is just a small fraction of the money the most reactionary, imperialist press around gave him. Your cult-God was weapon used, and paid handsomely for, by the pro-Hitler press!

[RED DAVE]

Your cult-God was weapon used, and paid handsomely for, by the pro-Hitler press!You really are despicable when you compare a revolutionary martyr to an apologist for Stalin.

Stalin made a deal with Hitler, not Trotsky you swine. Just like the CPUSA sold out the working class during WWII with its no-strike pledge.

RED DAVE

[graymouser]

The Daily Express was Lord Beaverbrook's paper. This sum, adjusted for today's dollars, is well over $800,000, and this is just a small fraction of the money the most reactionary, imperialist press around gave him. Your cult-God was weapon used, and paid handsomely for, by the pro-Hitler press!
This is a great example of the kind of sloppy, guilt-by-association riddled ludicrous excuse for history that characterizes Stalinist falsification. Out of the $62,000 you account for, $10,000 is split between several papers that included the Daily Express, whose owner Lord Beaverbrook did in fact harbor some Nazi sympathies, although the only documentation I see of them happens around the late '30s, almost a decade after he would've paid Trotsky anything.

It proves nothing, politically, that Trotsky took advantage of the public forums offered him by the bourgeois press - any communist in his position would've had to be an idiot not to do so. Moreover, anyone even vaguely familiar with Trotsky's writings knows that he was quite explicitly Marxist in all the writings cited (his dispatches, My Life and History of the Russian Revolution) and used that platform to a fervent defense of the revolution. Indeed, his History is a masterwork of revolutionary theory.

Of course, there was a member of the CPSU who really did make a pact with Hitler - but his name happened to be Stalin, not Trotsky.

[Red_Struggle]

You really are despicable when you compare a revolutionary martyr to an apologist for Stalin.

Oh right. It's not like Trotsky handed in the names of Marxist-Leninists to gain a visa for Mexico or anything. And y'know, it's not like Trotsky tried to form factions within the party if he didn't get his way. And it's not like Trotsky blamed all the bureaucratic issues of the USSR on Stalin, when in reality, excess bureaucracy build up during Lenin's lifetime.

Just sayin'...


Stalin made a deal with Hitler, not Trotsky you swine.

You would think that at the age of 67, you would at least be able to understand the historical necessity of temporary non-aggression deals with hostile states.

[Omsk]

Stalin made a deal with Hitler
Only after the allies abandoned him.Im sure it would have been different if the aristocrats showed a litle pragmatism instead of their good old mumbling and delaying.

[Jose Gracchus]

Considering that the book came out about two days ago that seems a tad premature.

Besides, name a "serious historian." You'll wind up with either reactionaries like Robert Conquest and other kneejerk types, or "revisionist" historians like Getty, Fitzpatrick, Manning, etc. who are generally quite eager to distance themselves from anything seen as sympathetic to Stalin. Manning (who it is said is ex-CPUSA) called Thurston a "Stalin apologist," and Thurston's book wasn't even praising Stalin.

See, this is exactly what I was talking about. A Stalinist finding his opponent's sources covered in racist/nationalist journals would dismiss them on those grounds alone...their apologia, contrariwise...well it gets published in Russia you see so you know how anti-imperialist it is...

[Jose Gracchus]

Whatever are you babbling incoherently about? The pro-Hitler English press (Lord Beaverbrock, Lord Rothsmere, and William Randolf Hearst) was the first one to give Trotsky a warm welcome, and paid him a fortune for his work.

LOL. You all are such knee-jerk bots you really have no grasp or irony, do you. This was exactly my point; you are habitually reliant on slimy guilt-by-association arguments but neither notice nor stomach them when it comes to your own apologia.

You sir, are a craven hypocrite.

[graymouser]

Oh right. It's not like Trotsky handed in the names of Marxist-Leninists to gain a visa for Mexico or anything.
And it's not like you can prove this allegation with reference to historians who aren't Stalinist hacks.


And y'know, it's not like Trotsky tried to form factions within the party if he didn't get his way.
Well, oh my god, factions! I mean, that's almost as bad as having all your opponents killed. Oh wait, it's not.


And it's not like Trotsky blamed all the bureaucratic issues of the USSR on Stalin, when in reality, excess bureaucracy build up during Lenin's lifetime.
Trotsky's actual analysis was that Stalin was the tool of the bureaucracy, and not vice versa.

[Red_Struggle]

And it's not like you can prove this allegation with reference to historians who aren't Stalinist hacks.

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv3n2/trotsky.htm

Is Charles Curtis a "Stalinist hack"? Is William Chase, a historian at the Pittsburgh University a "Stalinst hack"?


Well, oh my god, factions! I mean, that's almost as bad as having all your opponents killed.

Using factionalism to justify weakening and breaking up a party in the name of "freedom" for Trotskyism? Who would have thought!


Trotsky's actual analysis was that Stalin was the tool of the bureaucracy, and not vice versa.

Yeah, I know the Trot analysis of the evil, bureaucratic, bonapartist Stalin. Too bad it completely negates that the bureaucracy was more anti-Stalinist than Stalinist.

[graymouser]

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv3n2/trotsky.htm

Is Charles Curtis a "Stalinist hack"?
No, but then Curtiss is not used in the short piece to provide any information other than a link between Trotsky and Rivera.


Is William Chase, a historian at the Pittsburgh University a "Stalinst hack"?
Your article does not provide "concrete information," it just states that it exists. I don't know Chase even by reputation and couldn't say - but the fact is, the evidence is certainly not presented in that short bit of conspiracy-mongering trash.


Using factionalism to justify weakening and breaking up a party in the name of "freedom" for Trotskyism? Who would have thought!
This is just nonsense - no one was talking of "weakening" or "breaking up" the Communist Party in any way. Trotsky led a principled opposition in the party against a number of undeclared and highly unprincipled factions; first Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev, then Stalin-Bukharin. It did the other three little good, thanks to your hero, the murderer of the Central Committee that led the party in the October Revolution.


Yeah, I know the Trot analysis of the evil, bureaucratic, bonapartist Stalin. Too bad it completely negates that the bureaucracy was more anti-Stalinist than Stalinist.
Yet you post nonsense that tries to falsify the analysis by inverting it and presenting it as a non-materialist theory of personalities, just like your demagogic use of the term "evil" above. As for your beloved bureaucracy, in what period and by what sources are you trying to portray them as "anti-Stalinist"? These things changed over time.

[DaringMehring]

These kinds of threads are always good for exposing who is a Marxist-Leninist and who is a Stalinist-Zombiest.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell, with people in that tradition.

[Red_Struggle]

No, but then Curtiss is not used in the short piece to provide any information other than a link between Trotsky and Rivera.

It does point out that Curtiss had been in close contact with both Trotsky and Rivera by working on the ACDLT. And seeing as how Rivera was in the process of transmitting information on the PCM and Mexican trade union activity to the FBI...well, you can put the pieces together.



Your article does not provide "concrete information," it just states that it exists.

'In June [1940], Robert McGregor of the [US] Consulate met with Trotsky in his home... he met again with Trotsky on 13 July... Trotsky told McGregor in detail of the allegations and evidence he had compiled... He gave to McGregor the names of Mexican publications, political and labour leaders, and government officials allegedly associated with the PCM [Mexico and the USSR were the only countries in the world to materially support the fight against Franco's Fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39]. He charged that one of the Comintern's [the Communist international's] leading agents, Carlos Contreras served on the PCM Directing Committee. He also discussed the alleged efforts of Narciso Bassols, former Mexican Ambassador to France, whom Trotsky claimed was a Soviet agent, to get him deported from Mexico.'


I'd say that's pretty damning.




I don't know Chase even by reputation and couldn't say

http://www.history.pitt.edu/faculty/chase.php


no one was talking of "weakening" or "breaking up" the Communist Party in any way.

Maybe today that might seem like the case, but had Trotsky had his way, the factories and the trade unions would have been militarized, Soviet power would have fallen earlier than it did, and in order to put Permanent Revolution in practice (ie. the idea that socialism could not be build in the USSR at all), the Red Army would have had to march all over Europe. Something tells me that wouldn't go over to well with the workers of other countries.



Yet you post nonsense that tries to falsify the analysis by inverting it and presenting it as a non-materialist theory of personalities, just like your demagogic use of the term "evil" above.

Hey, you guys are the ones that blame everything on one man. Surely he must have been evil.


As for your beloved bureaucracy

Cute


in what period and by what sources are you trying to portray them as "anti-Stalinist"?

Both Stalin and Molotov encouraged anti-bureaucratic methods in order to combat corruption. If they were the embodiment of bureaucracy, why was the amendment to include multi-candidate elections included at all?
And why would Stalin bother writing to the Ministry of Education telling them that a biography of him would be out of place and that it would be harmful to childrens' minds?

That is not to say that these measures were perfect. In most cases, they were pretty sloppy to be honest. Accountability meetings within the factory committees were a step in the right direction, but there were issues with actual workers' control of industry. Still, the workers had more freedom than in any capitalist country.

[Delenda Carthago]

You really are despicable when you compare a revolutionary martyr to an apologist for Stalin.

Stalin made a deal with Hitler, not Trotsky you swine. Just like the CPUSA sold out the working class during WWII with its no-strike pledge.

RED DAVE
Actually, it was Stalin who crushed the Axis and it was the trots who did nothing to resist nazism Europe wide.Matter of fact,many times,Greece included,they sabotaged the resistance of the communists.

[resurgence]

Actually, it was Stalin who crushed the Axis and it was the trots who did nothing to resist nazism Europe wide.Matter of fact,many times,Greece included,they sabotaged the resistance of the communists.

Even today Trots have a habit of running to the police. The CWI in particular.

[HEAD ICE]

I knew it would be only a matter of time until someone (either you or "red" dave) showed up.

Damn you put the "red" in quotation marks. You really got him there. I'm impressed.

[Fungy]

LOL. You all are such knee-jerk bots you really have no grasp or irony, do you. This was exactly my point; you are habitually reliant on slimy guilt-by-association arguments but neither notice nor stomach them when it comes to your own apologia.

You sir, are a craven hypocrite.

1. I've read a great deal of Trotsky's crap. Knowing his was a tool of the pro-Hitler press never stopped me from reading him! Indeed, it's always fascinating how Trotsky handled current events. For instance, when Tukhachevsky was executed, Trotsky openly said he never took the "communist convictions" of this guy seriously. A few days later, no doubt after realizing the imperialist press had created the hero-Tukhachevsky narrative without him, began signing the praises of his old comrade...

2. Your statement was poorly worded. I couldn't decipher what you were saying at all.

3. I have no problem with the publication that decided to publish some of Furr's stuff. As another poster said, it mostly publishes communist stuff, but sometimes interesting Russian nationalist pieces as well. So does Counterpunch, who has also published interesting articles by people who are probably real anti-Semites. Even stopped clocks are right twice a day.

So I fail to see how anything is hypocritical of me.

[Jose Gracchus]

"Probably" real anti-Semites is not the same thing as publishing in a Holocaust deniers' journal, coming from those who think HITLER HEARST PRESS is the beginning and end of an argument. Provide proof of Trotsky "tailing" bourgeois masters?

Did I spell that out in small clumps of letters enough for you? I think it is also extremely likely you are a sock puppet.

[pranabjyoti]

The best character of trots in USSR during Stalin has been well exposed in the Moscow trial. There are a huge of lot of neutral observers like journalists, lawyers, diplomats, writers who had seen the whole plot unfolding before their own eyes and many had written books about their experiences. There are books also written by neutral non-soviet technocrats, who exposed how trots sabotaged the industrialization of USSR from inside. A great deal of such facts can be found in The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Albert Kahn and Michael Sears. Another good reading is Lies Concerning The History of CPSU by Maria Sousa.
I have given a list of such books previously in history section repeatedly. I don't want to repeat that again.

[kasama-rl]

"A great deal of such facts can be found in The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Albert Kahn...

Apparently you are not aware that this book is a fictionalized dramatization of the official government version of history. If you think that these are facts, or that this is from "neutral" observers, you are seriously mislead.

This kind of book is what Maoists call "cutting the toes to fit the shoes" -- you include those facts that bolster your thesis, you ignore those facts that refute your thesis, you invent phony facts to fill the gap.

Communists should be fearless materialists, we should be partizans of the truth, not slavish students of apologetics and flimsy self-justifications.

[resurgence]

[/I]Apparently you are not aware that this book is a fictionalized dramatization of the official government version of history. If you think that these are facts, or that this is from "neutral" observers, you are seriously mislead.

Communists should be fearless materialists, we should be partizans of the truth, not slavish students of apologetics and flimsy self-justifications.

Yeah why not trust outright capitalist "history" or Trotskyite propaganda instead? That would really "materialistic" and not slavish...:rolleyes:

[Fungy]

"Probably" real anti-Semites is not the same thing as publishing in a Holocaust deniers' journal

Cockburn is global-warming skeptic as well. Does that discredit everyone who Counterpunch decides to publish? Of course not.


coming from those who think HITLER HEARST PRESS is the beginning and end of an argument. Provide proof of Trotsky "tailing" bourgeois masters?

Tailism is a very specific thing. When you literally make your bread and butter (and enough money to fund your entire organization) writing propaganda for the bourgeoisie press, that is something completely different.


Did I spell that out in small clumps of letters enough for you? I think it is also extremely likely you are a sock puppet.

I think it is extremely like you talk in a highly convoluted fashion in real life as well.

[RED DAVE]

The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Albert Kahn and Michael Sears.Don't know Sears, but Kahn was in and around the CPUSA for decades, a fairly good writer, and a political hack. Anything he wrote about the USSR should be taken with a pound or two of salt.

Time you types started to get honest about Stalin's judicial and nonjudicial murder of the Old Bolsheviks or else, as the working class rises, you ain't gonna be worth tits on a bull.

RED DAVE

[Jose Gracchus]

Cockburn is global-warming skeptic as well. Does that discredit everyone who Counterpunch decides to publish? Of course not.

Of course not. I'm accusing you of being a hypocrite. That means you claim to have principles you, in fact, do not. In this case, if Counterpunch was an overtly anti-Stalinist (what you call "anti-communist"), I am sure you would use an excuse like that.


Tailism is a very specific thing. When you literally make your bread and butter (and enough money to fund your entire organization) writing propaganda for the bourgeoisie press, that is something completely different..

So much better than giving cover and trade support to the Nazi war effort for a couple years, right? I'm sure you'll wave that tired NEEDED TIME excuse, when its a cold day in Hell you ever meet a Stalinist that cracked open a history book on the Soviet war effort (only Getty quotes need apply). Not that I have a problem with Getty, because I'm sure a troll like you will jump on that like a dog on a shred of dirty meat.


I think it is extremely like you talk in a highly convoluted fashion in real life as well.

Yeah, and I imagine you couldn't get laid to save your life, and probably scare all the women away from any orgs you participate in. We could go on "thinking" and "imagining" all day, thankfully it doesn't mean a thing.

Maybe you could respond at face value, and stop wasting my and everyone else's time with your self-indulgent showmanship.

[Fungy]

Of course not. I'm accusing you of being a hypocrite. That means you claim to have principles you, in fact, do not. In this case, if Counterpunch was an overtly anti-Stalinist (what you call "anti-communist"), I am sure you would use an excuse like that.

Counterpunch is anti-Stalin and largely anti-communist, so I don't see what point you could possibly be babbling about. I still read it anyway, as it contains a lot of useful analysis.


So much better than giving cover and trade support to the Nazi war effort for a couple years, right?This, like how some people who post here that claim to be involved in labor struggles, is fictitious. Though truth isn't usually a concern for most posters here, eh?


I'm sure you'll wave that tired NEEDED TIME excuse, when its a cold day in Hell you ever meet a Stalinist that cracked open a history book on the Soviet war effort (only Getty quotes need apply). Not that I have a problem with Getty, because I'm sure a troll like you will jump on that like a dog on a shred of dirty meat.The best book on the subject is Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts. Getty doesn't generally write about the war period, so why would anyone quote him? Roberts is an ex-fellow traveler himself, and was already being red-baited when this book came out, but it's by far the best treatment available.


Yeah, and I imagine you couldn't get laid to save your lifeMy, how concerned you are with what I do with my genitals!


and probably scare all the women away from any orgs you participate in.One has to wonder what orgs you actually participate in at all.


We could go on "thinking" and "imagining" all day, thankfully it doesn't mean a thing.Yes, you are correct. There is no real need for me to "imagine" anything about you.

[ComradeOm]

Besides, name a "serious historian." You'll wind up with either reactionaries like Robert Conquest and other kneejerk types, or "revisionist" historians like Getty, Fitzpatrick, Manning, etc. who are generally quite eager to distance themselves from anything seen as sympathetic to Stalin. Manning (who it is said is ex-CPUSA) called Thurston a "Stalin apologist," and Thurston's book wasn't even praising Stalin.I love how your definition of what constitutes a "serious historian" is dependent on how sympathetic they are to Stalin. Of course once you've discounted all historians who are not overtly "sympathetic to Stalin" you might well find someone who approves of Furr. I doubt that there'll be anything remotely "serious" about them though

[pranabjyoti]

I love how your definition of what constitutes a "serious historian" is dependent on how sympathetic they are to Stalin. Of course once you've discounted all historians who are not overtly "sympathetic to Stalin" you might well find someone who approves of Furr. I doubt that there'll be anything remotely "serious" about them though
Well, in that case your definition of "serious historian" is dependent on how apathetic they are to Stalin.

[pranabjyoti]

[/I]Apparently you are not aware that this book is a fictionalized dramatization of the official government version of history. If you think that these are facts, or that this is from "neutral" observers, you are seriously mislead.

This kind of book is what Maoists call "cutting the toes to fit the shoes" -- you include those facts that bolster your thesis, you ignore those facts that refute your thesis, you invent phony facts to fill the gap.

Communists should be fearless materialists, we should be partizans of the truth, not slavish students of apologetics and flimsy self-justifications.
Well, in that case you want to mean that all the witnesses of the trial were also "Stalinist hacks" or some kind of that. Many have told their opinion about the book I mentioned, but they just omitted their opinion about the sources mentioned in the books. You are teaching me regarding "shoe and toe", but do you yourself aren't doing the same way?

[Ismail]

I love how your definition of what constitutes a "serious historian" is dependent on how sympathetic they are to Stalin. Of course once you've discounted all historians who are not overtly "sympathetic to Stalin" you might well find someone who approves of Furr. I doubt that there'll be anything remotely "serious" about them thoughI didn't say that. I said that practically all "serious historians" in the field are either going to be reactionaries or are only going to give muted support for some of Furr's research, at best. I'm saying that talking of "serious historians" is rather odd in a field which isn't always known for having objective scholarship. Thurston was a serious historian (as much as most anyone else in the field today) and he was denounced by various "serious historians" throughout the early and mid-1990's, including Robert Conquest. Thurston wasn't "sympathetic" to Stalin, he was looking at things objectively. Getty isn't "sympathetic" to Stalin, nor is Manning, Davies, Fitzpatrick, or any others.

I'm just saying that since Furr is openly pro-Stalin and an avowed Communist, that isn't going to get him many reviews.

[ComradeOm]

I'm saying that talking of "serious historians" is rather odd in a field which isn't always known for having objective scholarship.So you believe that there are no "serious historians" of the Soviet Union active today? Apart from Furr of course, who is stigmatised due to his political views and not the fact that his version of history is almost entirely at odds with other research into the period

The fact that Furr has not featured in the continuing academic debates on Soviet history (which are entirely healthy, if on occasion somewhat childish) does however speak volumes. Conquest reacts with vitriol to the likes of Wheatcroft because they present real challenges to his own theories. Furr is ignored because he has presented nothing remotely similar. He does not publish papers, he does not construct notable research and he does not contribute to the various discourses. His contributions to the field are minimal. The issue of whether or not he is a communist is not relevant - it is still possible to be a Marxist and be taken seriously as a historian - but first one must actually be a historian and engage with other historians. Unless of course we're still writing them off of ideologically wanting

[Invader Zim]

I didn't say that. I said that practically all "serious historians" in the field are either going to be reactionaries or are only going to give muted support for some of Furr's research, at best. I'm saying that talking of "serious historians" is rather odd in a field which isn't always known for having objective scholarship. Thurston was a serious historian (as much as most anyone else in the field today) and he was denounced by various "serious historians" throughout the early and mid-1990's, including Robert Conquest. Thurston wasn't "sympathetic" to Stalin, he was looking at things objectively. Getty isn't "sympathetic" to Stalin, nor is Manning, Davies, Fitzpatrick, or any others.

I'm just saying that since Furr is openly pro-Stalin and an avowed Communist, that isn't going to get him many reviews.



Eric Hobsbawm, a committed Marxist and supporter of the ussr (even after its military adventures in the 50s) is a widely respected historian, as are many other Marxists. They are not ideologically censored from debate, quite the reverse. The notion entertained by stalinists that there's a conspiracy against their beloved despot is nonsense disproved by even the most perfunctory historiographical survey.

[Fungy]

For no other period or topic have historians been so eager to write and accept history-by- anecdote. Grand analytical generalizations have come from secondhand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories (`My friend met Bukharin's wife in a camp and she said...') have become primary sources on central political decision making. The need to generalize from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumors into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation. Indeed, the leading expert on the Great Purges [Conquest] has written that `truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay' and that `basically the best, thought not infallible, source is rumor.'

...Such statements would be astonishing in any other field of history. Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence. Conquest goes on to say that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with one another. This procedure would be sound only if rumors were not repeated and if memoirists did not read each other's works.

This, from one of the leading lights in the entire field of Soviet history.

Yes, contrary what ComradeOm and Invader Zim are saying here, the bias in this field is overwhelming, to the extent that even people like J. Arch Getty are openly attacked as Stalin apologists by people like Conquest and Applebaum. Expressing any sympathy for the USSR is simply beyond the pale: you won't have any career in the field worth speaking of because of it.

People like Robert Thurston, also stigmatized as a Stalin apologist, by no less than people like Roberta Manning, simply opted to stop doing research and publishing in the field altogether.

Eric Hobsbawm, like most of the Trotskyites in the field, are useful idiots. As Khrushchev once said of Hoxha, "He bared his fangs at us even more menacingly than the Chinese themselves," so is the job of pseudo-Marxists like Hobsbawm, to bare their fangs more eagerly, to convince the masses of people revolution will only hurt them, so they don't demand more of their liberal-bourgeois and social-Fascist leaders, least they get the totalitarian nightmare of the USSR. That is the purpose people like Hobsbawm, Tucker, Rogovin, and other pseudo-Marxist trash serve to their bourgeois masters.

[Fungy]

The fact that Furr has not featured in the continuing academic debates on Soviet history (which are entirely healthy, if on occasion somewhat childish) does however speak volumes. Conquest reacts with vitriol to the likes of Wheatcroft because they present real challenges to his own theories. Furr is ignored because he has presented nothing remotely similar. He does not publish papers, he does not construct notable research and he does not contribute to the various discourses. His contributions to the field are minimal. The issue of whether or not he is a communist is not relevant - it is still possible to be a Marxist and be taken seriously as a historian - but first one must actually be a historian and engage with other historians. Unless of course we're still writing them off of ideologically wanting

It is not true that Furr has not had a place in academic debates. He was cited by Getty in an article, had an article on Tukhachevsky published in the journal Russian History, has published many, many other articles in Russian academic journals (where the anti-communist paradigm doesn't completely dominate the entire field), including being the first to give to the public many, many primary source documents dealing with events in the 1930s. The book this thread was devoted to was a best-seller in Russia, and has already been reprinted.

[ComradeOm]

It is not true that Furr has not had a place in academic debates. He was cited by Getty in an article, had an article on Tukhachevsky published in the journal Russian History...Let's have a look at these shall we? The first 'citing' is an off hand acknowledgement in a footnote from a 1983 reply to Barzun and Graff. Furr is not 'citied' in that no paper was referenced. Instead the acknowledgement reads in its entirety as: "My thanks to Professor Grover C. Furr for information on Svetlanin/Likhach". The second reference you note was a brief review of Butson's The Tsar's Lieutenant in 1985. This is the sum total of references to Furr or his work on JSTOR. No doubt the latter is merely a tool of anti-communist reactionaries. All the real research and debate is done in the non-peer reviewed journals that you're about to reference, right?


The book this thread was devoted to was a best-seller in Russia, and has already been reprinted.How many reprints has The Great Terror been through? Book sales are no indication of academic merit


Yes, contrary what ComradeOm and Invader Zim are saying here, the bias in this field is overwhelming, to the extent that even people like J. Arch Getty are openly attacked as Stalin apologists by people like Conquest and Applebaum. Expressing any sympathy for the USSR is simply beyond the pale: you won't have any career in the field worth speaking of because of it.But wait, I was under the impression that Getty was "one of the leading lights in the entire field of Soviet history"? How can this be when anyone who is not a staunch anti-communist finds it impossible to build "a career in the field worth speaking of"? You are holding up a 'serious historian' as proof that there are no 'serious historians' in the field :confused:

Is Getty sympathetic to the USSR? If so, how does he have a career in the field; never mind be one of its "leading lights"? If not, why should we trust his word when he is clearly a reactionary anti-communist?


Eric Hobsbawm, like most of the Trotskyites in the field, are useful idiotsRight. So we've narrowed this down somewhat. Its possible to have a career in the field of Soviet history if you are rabidly anti-communist, liberal, or a Trotskyite. Possibly anarchist as well, hmmmm? I suspect that at the end of this well find that the only people who are actually discriminated against are the Stalinists. Because, you know, they're up against some grand conspiracy

Sorry, did I say 'grand conspiracy'? What I actually meant was 'their insufferable persecution complex'

(Incidentally, who would consider Hobsbawm, a long-standing member of the CPGB, to be a Trot?)

[Fungy]

Let's have a look at these shall we? The first 'citing' is an off hand acknowledgement in a footnote from a 1983 reply to Barzun and Graff. Furr is not 'citied' in that no paper was referenced.

He is "cited" as a source of information that Getty included in his article.


The second reference you note was a brief review of Butson's The Tsar's Lieutenant in 1985. This is the sum total of references to Furr or his work on JSTOR.

So what? Do you know the story behind even why the journal even decided to publish it? One of the editors literally had to threaten to resign if it wasn't published, as no one could give absolutely any reason whatsoever to reject it on empirical grounds.

The story of this is just another example of the extreme, extreme bias that exists in the field against anyone who would dare show sympathy to the USSR.


How many reprints has The Great Terror been through? Book sales are no indication of academic merit

Booksales are generally a good indication of the interest in the what the author is saying. And lots of people in Russia are very, very interested in what Furr has to say.


But wait, I was under the impression that Getty was "one of the leading lights in the entire field of Soviet history"? How can this be when anyone who is not a staunch anti-communist finds it impossible to build "a career in the field worth speaking of"? You are holding up a 'serious historian' as proof that there are no 'serious historians' in the field

You seem to be confused. Getty is not sympathetic to the USSR. Getty routinely covers his ass with all sorts of anti-Stalin stuff all the time, even while he is demolishing the whole paradigm. The best example is his article comparing Stalin and Margaret Thatcher. His whole article is about how Margaret Thatcher had more power over the government of England than Stalin did over the USSR. Yet the article begins with all the obligatory references to Stalin being an absolute dictator...


Is Getty sympathetic to the USSR? If so, how does he have a career in the field; never mind be one of its "leading lights"? If not, why should we trust his word when he is clearly a reactionary anti-communist?

Getty is not, at least openly, sympathetic to the USSR in anyway. What he is, like a whole bunch of people in the field, dubbed "revisionists" by the anti-communist academic establishment, is someone actually committed to a (relatively) honest evaluation of the evidence. There are a lot of people like Getty, and their scholarship is invaluable. On the hand, the vast majority of people are just Conquest clones.


Right. So we've narrowed this down somewhat. Its possible to have a career in the field of Soviet history if you are rabidly anti-communist, liberal, or a Trotskyite. Possibly anarchist as well, hmmmm? I suspect that at the end of this well find that the only people who are actually discriminated against are the Stalinists. Because, you know, they're up against some grand conspiracy

Despite your sarcasm, this is basically true. This shouldn't even need to actually be debated. There are scores of works by numerous people on the gigantic bias against most anything Left-wing in the university system. Michael Parenti's essay "Repression in Academia" would be a good place to start. David Smith's "Who Rules the Universities: An Essay in Class Analysis" goes over the historical evolution of the university system well. Academia has always been a place where Orthodox views are mercilessly enforced.

Soviet scholarship is just a special case within this overall framework. As the whole anti-communist paradigm of the USSR is, in large part, a creation of Leon Trotsky's, it shouldn't come as any sort of surprise his followers are tolerated in the field.


(Incidentally, who would consider Hobsbawm, a long-standing member of the CPGB, to be a Trot?

I didn't say Hobsbawm was a Trot. Neither is Tucker, who calls himself a "humanist Marxist." But they are essentially just like them, for all practical purposes.

[Jose Gracchus]

THOSE DAMNED DE FACTO TROTS! :lol:

[Kibbutznik]

I find it funny that Albert E. Kahn is being cited here as an objective source on the Soviet Union. Ignoring that for a moment, making him into some sort of anti-revisionist saint is further silly. The man is too dead to protest the anachronism; but at any rate, he was never opposed to Khrushchev, so it's great to see so many people who hate Khrushchev trying to marshal a dead journalist to their side.

[pranabjyoti]

I find it funny that Albert E. Kahn is being cited here as an objective source on the Soviet Union. Ignoring that for a moment, making him into some sort of anti-revisionist saint is further silly. The man is too dead to protest the anachronism; but at any rate, he was never opposed to Khrushchev, so it's great to see so many people who hate Khrushchev trying to marshal a dead journalist to their side.
Hay man, he is just a source of information regarding Moscow trial, nothing more than that.

[Ismail]

I find it funny that Albert E. Kahn is being cited here as an objective source on the Soviet Union. Ignoring that for a moment, making him into some sort of anti-revisionist saint is further silly. The man is too dead to protest the anachronism; but at any rate, he was never opposed to Khrushchev, so it's great to see so many people who hate Khrushchev trying to marshal a dead journalist to their side.Kahn was apparently a Soviet agent who would supply the USSR with information on reactionary émigré Ukrainians and such while working as a journalist. He later rebuked The Great Conspiracy once it was unfashionable to defend the Moscow Trials (Furr himself was able to get in touch with his wife in the 1980's on this issue) and was probably always pro-Soviet until his death. He was your stereotypical CPUSA member of the time.

The value of the book is that it summarizes the Moscow Trials from the Soviet position, not that its author was apparently some super secret anti-revisionist genius or whatever, which he obviously wasn't. The book wasn't meant to be objective and I don't see anyone claiming it is.


So you believe that there are no "serious historians" of the Soviet Union active todayOf course there are. I don't need to name names.


Eric Hobsbawm, a committed Marxist and supporter of the ussr (even after its military adventures in the 50s) is a widely respected historian, as are many other Marxists.Yes, and? Furr's focus is on the history of the USSR in the 1930's-40's, particularly relating to Stalin's activities. Furr is not shy about supporting Stalin. That isn't Hobsbawm's focus nor his field, so your answer is irrelevant. Marxists are tolerated in all sorts of areas; openly pro-Stalin communists in matters relating to the Great Purge not so much.

Then again I know from earlier discussions with you that you seem to compare Getty to David Irving (apparently Getty has some sort of strange admiration for Stalin that everyone on earth has overlooked and is a secret "Stalinist"), so yeah.

[Invader Zim]

Yes, contrary what ComradeOm and Invader Zim are saying here, the bias in this field is overwhelming, to the extent that even people like J. Arch Getty are openly attacked as Stalin apologists by people like Conquest and Applebaum.

So? Even if the accusaion against Getty, etc, by rightwingers such as Conquest were true, and even a cursary reading of Getty would soon prove that it is not, then precisely how do you seek to contradict my assertion that such individuals are not censored from academic debate?


Expressing any sympathy for the USSR is simply beyond the pale: you won't have any career in the field worth speaking of because of it.

Well, given that a large chunk of the most esteemed historical cannon of the last 60 years was penned by communist historians with a veritable love affair with the USSR, clearly you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

So, lets just investigate this suggestion.

As I noted Eric Hobsbawm, who has been argued, by individuals such as David Caute, as being among the greatest living historians. Hobsbawm took a PhD from Cambridge; a professors chair from Birkbeck; was a Fellow at King's Cambridge; was a visiting professor at Stanford and Manhattan's New School for Social Research; a Fellow of the British Academy as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Emeritus professor at Birkbeck and The New School for Social Research; oh and became President of Birkbeck. Yet was also an outspoken supporter of the USSR until he outlived it in 1991.

Let us then examine Christopher Hill, the highly celebrated historian of 17th century Britain. Hill attended Oxford; had a position as a lecturer at Cardiff; returned to lecture at Balliol College Oxford; and eventually became Master of Balliol in 1965 until his retirement in 1978. Even after his retirement he continued working as a professor for the Open University.

Eugene Genovese, one of the towering figures in the study of American slavery famously stated, and I quote:

"Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it."

Genovese, in recent years (i.e from the late 1990s) he has radically shifted to the right, but his many years as an outspoken communist did not prevent him from being a professor at Rutgers University, Rochester and a whole host of other institutions, or even becoming President of the Organization of American Historians.

E. H. Carr, who penned one of the most influencial books on the study of history, a major figure in the development of International Relations theory and the author of the massive multi-volume history of Soviet Russia. Carr maintained a very healthy academic career, save a minor blip when he was fired from Aberystwyth - not for his political views mind, but for have a rather career-endangering tendency to sleep with his colleagues wives. The soviet historian wrote of Carr's work on Soviet history that it was a "scrupulous, professionally conscientious work", and it was famously slated by some rightwing historians for its manifest pro-Soviet slant, and Richard Pipes stated that Carr was no different from a holocaust denier.

But despite this the International Politics department in Aberystwyth, despite the irony of having fired him for being unable to keep his dick in his pants, hold an annual E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture.

I could list many more examples so let us dispense with the myth that being sympathetic to the Soviet Union automatically excludes historians from debate and ends their career. It didn't and still doesn't.


You seem to be confused. Getty is not sympathetic to the USSR. Getty routinely covers his ass with all sorts of anti-Stalin stuff all the time, even while he is demolishing the whole paradigm. The best example is his article comparing Stalin and Margaret Thatcher. His whole article is about how Margaret Thatcher had more power over the government of England than Stalin did over the USSR. Yet the article begins with all the obligatory references to Stalin being an absolute dictator...

Wait, so let's get this straight. You claim that Getty isn't sympathetic to the USSR, and then describe his efforts to establish that is merely an effort to "cover his ass" and that a sensible reading of his work suggests the precise opposite? And you are calling Om confused?



Eric Hobsbawm, like most of the Trotskyites in the field, are useful idiots. As Khrushchev once said of Hoxha, "He bared his fangs at us even more menacingly than the Chinese themselves," so is the job of pseudo-Marxists like Hobsbawm, to bare their fangs more eagerly, to convince the masses of people revolution will only hurt them, so they don't demand more of their liberal-bourgeois and social-Fascist leaders, least they get the totalitarian nightmare of the USSR. That is the purpose people like Hobsbawm, Tucker, Rogovin, and other pseudo-Marxist trash serve to their bourgeois masters.

Right... no actual content, just character assassination. I hadn't hoped for anything better, my expectations are invariably low when it comes to Stalinists, so at least you didn't disappoint.

[Invader Zim]

Yes, and? Furr's focus is on the history of the USSR in the 1930's-40's, particularly relating to Stalin's activities. Furr is not shy about supporting Stalin. That isn't Hobsbawm's focus nor his field, so your answer is irrelevant. Marxists are tolerated in all sorts of areas; openly pro-Stalin communists in matters relating to the Great Purge not so much.

Actually Furr is not an academic historian of any stripe, he is employed by an English literature department (not a history department) and his academic specialism is medieval literature as opposed to its history. So it isn't actually Furr's field either, and the point stands. Historians, regardless of topic, if their arguments are convinsing and their scholarship of standard, have never been excluded from historical discourse. Hobsbawm is testiment to that fact. If you wish to make this only about Soviet History, as opposed to historical scholarship more widely, then i think you will find that E. H. Carr's various volumes of Soviet History received a considerable number of reviews from fellow academic historians.

Historians do not become excluded from debate because of their political views, they become excluded because they are shit. If Furr's work, while moon-lighting as a historian, has not attracted rave reviews or even really made any ripples within the international community of historians that is because it hasn't warrented it.

[Red_Struggle]

Historians do not become excluded from debate because of their political views, they become excluded because they are shit.

Yeah you're right. If mainstream academics and journalists don't approve of it, it's not worth reading.


If Furr's work, while moon-lighting as a historian, has not attracted rave reviews or even really made any ripples within the international community of historians that is because it hasn't warrented it.

Or maybe it's because capitalists and Trots would never allow the re-examination of Stalin in sight of the international community. They would be shooting themselves in the foot.

[Invader Zim]

Yeah you're right. If mainstream academics and journalists don't approve of it, it's not worth reading.



Or maybe it's because capitalists and Trots would never allow the re-examination of Stalin in sight of the international community. They would be shooting themselves in the foot.

But as I have noted there are plenty of "mainstream" historians on the left - who have managed to build impressive reputations, get their work published, referee other historians work, publish their own journals, etc, and the fact is that revisionist accounts of the Soviet Union have, when based on sound research, received considerable space in numerous academic publications and debates.

If there was a reasonable argument to be made which drew the same conclusions as Furr, etc, then there are plenty of reputable places it could have been published which have a lengthy history of publishing the work of Marxist historians. After all, as noted, it isn't like Marxist historians have had huge amounts of trouble publishing their research in the past - provided it has been of sufficent academic quality.

But naturally, I'm wasting my time. Your is typical of these kinds of debates with conspiricy theorists, be they 9/11 'truthers', climate change deniers, moon landing skeptics, or now apologists for Stalin, etc. It is never the fault of the advocates of the conspiricy that their beliefs do not receive the level of respect from the scholarly press their writings should get, the problem is apparently that the entire community of academics are 'in on it'.

:rolleyes:

If it weren't so fucking banal by this stage it would at least be amusing, but it isn't. Its just boring. The same tired and tedious ad hominem used to discredit anything and anyone who doesn't buy into the conspiricy. Its funny, because according dumbasses like you professional historians are either capitalists or "trots" hellbent on distorting the historical record to demonise ol' uncle Joe. But if you ask neo-nazi holocaust denier they are all apparently jews hell bent on misrepresenting the Nazi regime. The possibility that they are just reporting what they happen to have found in their research and that there is no conspiricy is apparently inconcievable.

[ComradeOm]

So what? Do you know the story behind even why the journal even decided to publish it? One of the editors literally had to threaten to resign if it wasn't published, as no one could give absolutely any reason whatsoever to reject it on empirical groundsAssuming that this is true, I can understand why. The review is frankly terrible and Furr displays the traditional Stalinist argument of simply waving away a whole range of sources that he doesn't agree with. This was particularly brazen when he had the gall to question Butson's scholarship while suggesting that the sources used are flawed because by being published in the Khrushchev era they automatically "serve Khrushchev's own political interest" and are therefore suspect

And this is one-half of Furr's contributions to the wide-ranging debates on Soviet history that have raged for over three decades now! What an intellectual titan he is


Booksales are generally a good indication of the interest in the what the author is saying. And lots of people in Russia are very, very interested in what Furr has to sayYes, and this is entirely different from assessing the academic merit of said books. Again, do you believe that Conquest's account of the purges and famines of the 1930s is more accurate or correct than others? It is after all by far and way the most popular account of the period in English. And let's not pretend that the Russian public has a particularly discerning taste here - popular and sensationalist histories that vilify Stalin (of which Suvorov's Icebreaker is probably the best known in English) have long been bestsellers in Russia


You seem to be confused. Getty is not sympathetic to the USSR. Getty routinely covers his ass with all sorts of anti-Stalin stuff all the time, even while he is demolishing the whole paradigm. The best example is his article comparing Stalin and Margaret Thatcher. His whole article is about how Margaret Thatcher had more power over the government of England than Stalin did over the USSR. Yet the article begins with all the obligatory references to Stalin being an absolute dictator...Zim has already covered the degree to which this makes little sense. I will ask though: do you really believe that Getty is simply lying when he makes statements like the below?

"Of course such a cold numerical approach risks overshadowing the individual personal and psychological horror of the event. Millions of lives were unjustly taken or destroyed in the Stalin period; the scale of the suffering is almost impossible to comprehend. The horrifying irrationality of the carnage involves no debatable moral questions - destruction of people can have no pros and cons. There has been a tendency to accuse "low estimators" of somehow justifying or defending Stalin, as if the deaths of 3 million famine victims were somehow less blameworthy than 7 million"


Getty is not, at least openly, sympathetic to the USSR in anyway. What he is, like a whole bunch of people in the field, dubbed "revisionists" by the anti-communist academic establishment, is someone actually committed to a (relatively) honest evaluation of the evidence. There are a lot of people like Getty, and their scholarship is invaluable. On the hand, the vast majority of people are just Conquest clonesYet the claim was that "you won't have any career in the field worth speaking of because of [the overwhelming bias]". Now you are telling me that there are "a whole bunch of people in the field" who are making "honest evaluations of the evidence"? You wonder why I am confused? Your statements make no sense when stacked against each other

Incidentally, it should set alarm bells ringing that few if any of the 'revisionist' generation can be said to be "sympathetic towards Stalin". They have introduced a welcome dose of nuance into studies of the Soviet state but are certainly not pro-Stalin in any way shape or form. Even the likes of Getty is still well removed from the apologism of Furr


As the whole anti-communist paradigm of the USSR is, in large part, a creation of Leon Trotsky's, it shouldn't come as any sort of surprise his followers are tolerated in the field:lol:

[Ismail]

Actually Furr is not an academic historian of any stripe, he is employed by an English literature department (not a history department) and his academic specialism is medieval literature as opposed to its history. So it isn't actually Furr's field either, and the point stands.As Furr pointed out (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/horowitzlies.html) against Horowitz a few years ago:

The "qualifications" game is nonsense. Every faculty member has to develop and teach courses outside his area of specialty. The real, valid questions to ask include these:


Has the professor thoroughly prepared his course by studying the major research on the subject in question?
Does the professor attempt to be objective, reaching his conclusions according to the best evidence available?
Does the professor make explicit the underlying assumptions governing the differing viewpoints or perspectives expressed by experts on this subject?
Does the professor clearly state his own perspective; method, and presuppositions?
Does the professor encourage students to question all statements and viewpoints, including -- especially -- his own?

Neither Horowitz nor his "researcher", DiPippo, asked any of these questions about my teaching. In fact, neither of them ever interviewed a single student in any of my courses, or obtained a single complaint from any individual student!
Furthermore, Robert Conquest, the famous, anti-communist, and hugely dishonest historian of the USSR, is a poet. He has no academic degree in poetry or literature. Yet he has written about literature. Victor Davis Hansen, neo-con political commentator on any subject under the sun, is a Classicist.
If you wish to make this only about Soviet History, as opposed to historical scholarship more widely, then i think you will find that E. H. Carr's various volumes of Soviet History received a considerable number of reviews from fellow academic historians.E.H. Carr's work wasn't based on analyzing the Great Purges, the supposed "anti-semitism" of Stalin, Stalin's activities during WWII, etc. He got as far as the Comintern to 1935 and was writing about the Spanish Civil War before he died. Carr focused on foreign affairs and economics, not "did Stalin kill Kirov" or "was Khrushchev's 'secret speech' correct in its claims?" It's also worth noting that Carr was practically the first major historian on the USSR, and that he was a prolific writer of high academic standing and plenty of access to various contacts, and that he actually wrote volumes of whole histories of the USSR.

Furr's work can't really be judged on the same level. Furr focuses on specific issues relating to the 1930's and 1940's USSR (almost always having to do with Stalin) and seeks to deconstruct what he views as myths about them. He directly contradicts pretty much everyone in the field at some point or another, and this is a field that saw Thurston condemned as a "Stalin apologist" by practically everyone (both "revisionist" historians and the Conquest type) even though Soviet history actually is Thurston's field.


If Furr's work, while moon-lighting as a historian, has not attracted rave reviews or even really made any ripples within the international community of historians that is because it hasn't warrented it.Well as I said it came out merely days ago, so yeah.

[Jose Gracchus]

ComradeOm's criticism and critique of Furr in no way resembles Horowitz. Horowitz wrote some red-baiting hit book (presumably so someday the Tea Partiers can live down to their fascist essence and try and death squad anyone in it), and attacked Furr personally, as well as his teaching qualifications. Horowitz was calling for ideological purges of the school! Of course one stands beside Furr on this; Furr's Stalinism has nothing to do with his ability to teach medieval literature competently.

As for the other critiques, they stand. I mean his "Stalin as Democrat" article seems entirely hinging on this say-so by Zhukov.

[pranabjyoti]

The value of the book is that it summarizes the Moscow Trials from the Soviet position, not that its author was apparently some super secret anti-revisionist genius or whatever, which he obviously wasn't. The book wasn't meant to be objective and I don't see anyone claiming it is.
Sorry, I differ with you in this regard. A good source of information of this book comes from Non-USSR citizens, who are mostly engineers, diplomats, writers, lawyers and MOSTLY FROM CAPITALIST COUNTRIES LIKE USA, GERMANY, UK. So, why not objective?
Not only this book, but there are other books too from the eye-witnesses. As per one of them, "If it's a staged drama, then it needs the writing capability of Shakespeare and production capability of Belasso combined to stage such a drama".

[Fungy]

In response to some of the comments Invader Zim has made regarding academia in general, all I can say to the reader is obviously he has a completely distorted view of the university system. I shall now post an essay of Michael Parenti's on the subject. I typed this up myself, and to my knowledge, it can't be found anywhere else online at the moment. Any typos or grammatical errors are probably my fault.


-------------

Repression in Academia

For some time we have been asked to believe that the quality of higher education is being devalued by the “politically correct” ideological tyranny of feminists, African-American and Latino militants, homosexuals, and Marxists. The truth may be elsewhere. The average university or college is a corporation, controlled by self-selected, self-perpetuating boards of trustees, drawn mostly from the corporate business world. Though endowed with little if any academic expertise, trustees have legal control of the property and policies of the institution. They are answerable to no one but themselves, exercising final authority over all matters of capital funding, budget, tuition, and the hiring, firing, and promotion of faculty and administrators. They even wield ultimate domination over curriculum, mandating course offerings they like while canceling ones that might earn their disfavor. They also have final say regarding course requirements, cross-disciplinary programs, and the existence of entire departments and schools within the university.

On the nation's campuses there also can be found faculty members who do “risk analysis” to help private corporations make safe investments abroad. Other faculty work on consumer responses, marketing techniques, and labor unrest. Still others devise methods for controlling rebellious peoples at home and abroad, be they Latin American villagers, inner-city residents, or factory workers. Funded by corporations, conservative foundations, the Pentagon, and other branches of government, the researchers develop new technologies of destruction, surveillance, control, and counterinsurgency. (Napalm was invented at Harvard.) They develop new ways of monopolizing agricultural production and natural resources. With their bright and often ruthless ideas they help make the world safe for those who own it. In sum, the average institution of higher learning owes more to Sparta than to Athens.

On these same campuses one can find ROTC programs that train future military officers, programs that are difficult to justify by any normal academic standard. The campuses are open to recruiters from various corporations, the CIA, and the armed forces. In 1993, an advertisement appeared in student newspapers across the nation promoting “student programs and career opportunities” with the CIA. Students “could be eligible for a CIA internship and tuition assistance” and would “get hands-on experience” working with CIA “professionals.” The advertisement did not explain how full-time students could get “hands-on experience” as undercover agents. Would it be by reporting on professors and fellow students who voiced iconoclastic views?

Without any apparent sense of irony, many of the faculty engaged in these worldly pursuits argue that a university should be a place apart from worldly and partisan interests, a temple of knowledge. In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning. In this respect, universities differ little from other social institutions such as the media, the arts, the church, schools, and various professions.

Most universities and colleges hardly qualify as hotbeds of dissident thought. The more likely product is a mild but pervasive ideological orthodoxy. College is a place where fundamental criticisms are not totally unknown but are just in scarce supply. It is also a place where students, out of necessity or choice, mortgage their future to corporate America.

Ideological repression in academia is as old as the nation itself. Through the eighteenth ad nineteenth centuries, most colleges were governed by prominent churchmen and wealthy merchants and landowners who believed it their duty to ensure faculty acceptance of theological preachments. In the early 1800s, trustees at northern colleges prohibited their faculties from engaging in critical discussions of slavery; abolitionism was a taboo subject. At southern colleges, faculty devoted much of their intellectual energies to justifying slavery and injecting racial supremacist notions into various parts of the curriculum. By the 1870s and 1880s, Darwinism was the great bugaboo in higher education. Presidents of nine prominent eastern colleges went on record as prohibiting the teaching of evolutionary theory.

By the 1880s, prominent businessmen came to dominate the boards of trustees of most institutions of higher learning (as they still do). Seldom hesitant to impose ideological controls, they fired faculty members who expressed heretical ideas on and off campus, who attended Populist Party conventions, championed anti-monopoly views, supported free silver, opposed U.S. Military interventions abroad, or defended the rights of labor leaders and socialists. Among the hundreds of dismissed over the years were such notable scholars as George Steele, Richard Ely, Edward Bemis, James Allen Smith, Henry Wade Rogers, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Paul Baran, and Scott Nearing.

The first president of Cornell, Andrew White, observed that while he believed “in freedom from authoritarianism of every kind, this freedom did not, however, extend to Marxists, anarchists, and other radical disturbers of the social order.” In 1908, White's contemporary, Harvard president Charles William Elliot, expressed relief that higher education rested safely in the hands of the “public-spirited, business or professional man,” away from the dangerous “class influences . . . exerted by farmers as a class, or trade unionists as a class.”

During World War I, university officials such as Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, explicitly forbade the faculty from criticizing the war, arguing that such heresy was no longer tolerable, for in times of war wrongheadedness was sedition and folly was treason. A leading historian, Charles Beard, was grilled by the Columbia trustees, who were concerned that his views might “inculcate disrespect for American institutions.” In disgust, Beard resigned from his teaching position, declaring that the trustees and Nicholas Murray Butler sought “to drive out or humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or unconventional views on political matters.”

Academia has seldom been receptive to persons of anticapitalist persuasion. Even during the radical days of the 1930s there were relatively few socialists or communists on college teaching staffs. Repression reached a heightened intensity during the McCarthyite witchhunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The rooting out of communists, Marxists, and other radicals was sometimes conducted by congressional and state legislative committees or by college administrators themselves. Among the victims were those who had past or present association with the Communist Party or one of its affiliated organizations.

One study during the McCarthy period found that, though never called before any investigative body, many faculty felt a need to prove their loyalty. Almost any criticism of the existing politico-economic order invited the suspicion that one might be harboring “communist tendencies.” Those who refused to sign loyalty oaths were dismissed outright. The relatively few academics who denounced the anticommunist witchhunts usually did so from an anticommunist premise, arguing that “innocent” (non-communist) people were being silenced or hounded out of their professions. The implication was that the inquisition was not wrong, just clumsy and overdone, that it was all right to deny Americans their constitutional rights if they were “guilty,” that is, really communists. The idea that Reds had as much right as anyone else to teach was openly entertained by only a few brave souls.

During the Vietnam era, things heated up. Faced with student demonstrations, sit-ins, and other disruptions, university authorities responded with a combination of liberalizing and repressive measures. They dropped course-distribution requirements in some instances and abolished parietal rules and other paternalistic restrictions on student dormitory life. Black studies and women's studies were established, as were a number of experimental social science programs that offered more “relevant” community-oriented courses and innovative teaching methods.

Along with the concessions, university authorities launched a repressive counteroffensive. Student activists were singled out for disciplinary actions. Campus police forces were expanded and used to attack demonstrations, as were off-campus police and, when necessary, the National Guard. Some students were arrested and expelled. At places like Kent State and Jackson State, students were shot and killed. Radicalized faculty lost their jobs, and some, including me, were assaulted by police during campus confrontations.

The purging of faculty continued through the 1970s and 1980s. Angela Davis, a communist, was let go by UCLA. Marlene Dixon, a Marxist-feminist sociologist, was fired from the University of Chicago and then from McGill University for her political activism. Bruce Franklin, a noted Melville scholar and tenured associate professor at Stanford, was fired for “inciting” students to demonstrate. Franklin later received an offer from the University of Colorado that was quashed by its board of regents, who based their decision on a packet of information supplied by the FBI that included false rumors, bogus letters, and unfavorable news articles.

A graduate student at the university of California, Mario Savio, who won national prominence in the 1960s as an antiwar activist and leader of the “Free Speech Movement” on the Berkeley campus, served four months in prison for one protest activity and subsequently was denied admission into various doctoral programs in physics despite having a master's degree in the subject and a sterling academic record. He spent the rest of his life unable to gain regular appointment in higher education. After many difficult years, Savio died in 1996 at the age of 53. His last job was a poorly paid adjunct at Sonoma State University.

At the University of Washington, Seattle, Kenneth Dolbeare's attempts to build a truly pluralistic political science department with a mix of conservative, mainstream, and radical faculty, including women and people of color, came under fire from the administration. After a protracted struggle, Dolbeare departed. All the progressive untenured members of the department were let go, as were all the progressive-minded members of other departments, including philosophy and economics.

Similar purges occurred across the nation. Within a three-year period in the early seventies at Dartmouth College, all but one of a dozen progressive faculty, who used to lunch together, were dismissed. In 1987, four professors at the New England School of Law were fired, despite solid endorsements by their colleagues. All four were involved in the Critical Legal Studies movement, a group that studied how the law acted as an instrument of the rich and powerful.

To a long list of the purged I can add my own name. In 1972, at the University of Vermont, I was denied renewal by the board of trustees despite my publications in leading scholarly journals, and despite the support of my students, my entire department, the faculty senate, the council of deans, the provost and the president. Unable to fault my teaching or scholarship, the trustees decided in a 15-to-4 vote that my antiwar activities constituted “unprofessional conduct.”

A dozen or so years later, I went to Brooklyn College as a one-year visiting professor with the understanding that a regular position would be given to the political science department for which I could later apply. My chairman's feeling was that given my qualifications, I would no doubt be the leading candidate. The administration, however, decided against it. A short time afterward, a City University chemistry professor, John Lombardi, happened to be talking to a Brooklyn College vice president at a faculty gathering. Lombardi, who was familiar with my work, asked him why I had been let go. “We found out about him,” said the vice president, who went on to indicate that the administration had discovered things about my political background that they did not like.

One could add many more instances from just about every discipline, including political science, economics, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, psychology and even physics, mathematics, chemistry, and musicology. Whole departments and even whole schools and colleges have been eradicated for taking the road less traveled. At the University of California, Berkeley, the entire school of criminology was abolished because many of its faculty had developed a class analysis of crime and criminal enforcement. Those who taught a more orthodox criminology were given appointments in other departments. Only the radicals were let go.

Even more frequent than firings are nonhirings. Highly qualified social scientists, who were also known progressives, have been turned down for positions at institutions too numerous to mention. The pattern become so pronounced at the University of Texas, Austin, in the mid-1970s, that graduate students staged a protest and charged the university with politically discriminatory hiring practices.

In 1981, the political science department of Virginia Common-wealth University invited me to become chairperson, but the decision was overruled by the dean, who announced that it was unacceptable to have a “leftist” as a head of a department. She did not explain why the same rule did not hold for a rightest or centrist or feminist (she claimed to be the latter). It is evident that academia speaks with two voices. One loudly proclaims professional performance as the reigning standard. The other whispers almost inaudibly that if you cross the parameters of permissible opinion, your scholarly and pedagogical performance are of no account.

Scholars of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist bent are regularly discriminated against in the distribution of research grants and scholarships. After writing The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills was abruptly cut off from foundation funding. To this day, radical academics are rarely considered for positions within their professional associations and are regularly passed over for prestigious lecture invitations, grants, and appointments to editorial boards of the more influential professional journals. Faculty are still advised to think twice about voicing controversial politico-economic perspectives. One historian writes that, when a young instructor and a group of her colleagues decided to offer “Marxism” as part of a social history course, she was warned by an older faculty member, “an ordinarily calm and rational gentleman,” that it would be “unwise for their department to list a course on Marxism in the catalogue.”

An instructor at Seton Hill College in Pennsylvania confided to a leftist student that he subscribed to a number of left publications and was well-versed in Marxist theory but the administration refused to let him teach it. The student wrote to an associate of mine, “I've had classes with this prof for two years and never suspected.” On some campuses, administrative officials have monitored classes, questioned the political content of books and films, and screened the lists of guest speakers—all in the name of scholarly objectivity and balance. In some places, however, trustees and administrators readily pay out huge sums for guest lectures by committed, highly partisan, right-wing ideologues.

The guardians of academic orthodoxy never admit that some of their decisions about hiring and firing faculty might be politically motivated. Instead, they will say the candidate has not published enough articles. Or if enough, the articles are not in conventionally acceptable academic journals. Or in if acceptable journals, they are still wanting in quality or originality, or show too narrow or diffuse a development. Seemingly objective criteria can be applied in endlessly elastic ways.

John Womack, one of the very few Marxists to ever obtain tenure at an elite university, and who became chair of the history department at Harvard, ascribes his survival to the fact that he was dealing with relatively obscure topics: “Had I been a bright young student in Russian history and taken positions perpendicular to American policy . . . I think my [academic] elders would have thought that I had a second-rate mind. Which is what you say when you disagree with somebody. You can't say, 'I disagree with the person politically.' You say, 'It's clear he has a second-rate mind.'”

College administrators and department heads, whatever their scholarly output, must be ready to serve as conservative enforcers. The administration at the University of Vermont brought in someone to chair the philosophy department who, by a nine to one vote, the department had turned down as insufficiently qualified. He proceeded to purge all the nontenured and politically progressive members who had voted against him. Over the objections of the political science department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the chancellor gave tenure to Walter Jones, not a particularly distinguished member of the profession. Jones was then made vice-chancellor, from which position he denied tenure to a radical political scientist, overruling a unanimous recommendation of the school's promotion and tenure committee.

Professional criteria proved especially elastic for those emigres from communist countries brought to the United States under the hidden sponsorship of national security agencies and immediately accorded choice university positions without meeting minimal academic standards. Consider the case of Soviet emigre and concert pianist Vladimir Feltsman, who, after receiving a first-rate, free musical education in the Soviet Union, defected to the United States in 1986 with the help of the U.S. embassy. In short time, Feltsman gave a White House concert, was hailed by President Reagan as a “moral hero,” and was set up in a posh Manhattan apartment. He then was appointed to the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he taught one class a week for twice the salary of a top-ranking professor, and was awarded an endowed chair and a distinguished fellowship. SUNY, New Paltz, itself was a poorly funded school with low salaries, heavy teaching loads, and inadequate services for students.

Mainstream academics treat their politically safe brands of teaching and research as the only ones that qualify as genuine scholarship. Such was the notion used to deny Samuel Bowles tenure at Harvard. Since Marxists economics is not really scholarly, it was argued, Bowles was neither a real scholar nor an authentic economist. Thus centrist ideologues have purged scholarly dissidents under the guise of protecting rather than violating academic standards. The decision seriously split the economics department and caused Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontif to quit Harvard in disgust.

Radical academics have been rejected because their political commitments supposedly disallow them from objective scholarship. In fact, much of the best scholarship comes from politically committed scholars. One goal of any teacher should be to introduce students to bodies of information and analysis that have been systematically ignored or suppressed—a task that usually is better performed by iconoclasts than by those who accept existing institutional and class arrangements as the finished order of things. So it has been feminists and African-American researchers who, in their partisan urgency, have revealed the previously unexamined sexist and racist presumptions and gaps of conventional scholarship. Likewise, it is leftist intellectuals (including some who are female or nonwhite) who have produced the challenging scholarship about popular struggle, political economy, and class power, subjects remaining largely untouched by centrists and conservatives. In sum, a dissenting ideology can awaken us to things regularly overlooked by conventional scholarship.

Orthodox ideological strictures are applied also to a teacher's outside political activity. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an instructor of political science, Ted Hayes, an anticapitalist, was denied a contract renewal because he was judged to have “outside political commitments” that made it impossible for him to be objective. Two of the senior faculty who voted against him were state committee members of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. There was no question as to whether their outside political commitments interfered with their objectivity as teachers or with the judgments they made about their colleagues.

Evron Kirkpatrick, who served as director of the American Political Science Association for more than twenty-five years, proudly enumerated the many political scientists who occupied public office, worked in electoral campaigns or served officialdom in various capacities. His comments evoked no outcry from his mainstream colleagues on behalf of scientific detachment. It seemed there was nothing wrong with political activism as long as one played a “sound role in government” (his words) rather than a dissenting role against it. Establishment academics like Kirkpatrick never explain how they supposedly avoid injecting politics into their science while so assiduously injecting their science into politics.

How neutral in their writings and teachings were such scholars Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick? Despite being proponents of America industrial-military policies at home and abroad—or because of it—they enjoyed meteoric academic careers and subsequently were selected to occupy prominent policymaking positions within conservative administrations in Washington. Outspoken political advocacy, then, is not a hindrance to one's career as long as one advocates the right things.

It is a rare radical scholar who has not encountered difficulties when seeking employment or tenure, regardless of his or her qualifications. The relatively few progressive dissidents who manage to get tenure sometimes discover that their lot is one of isolation within their own departments. They endure numerous slights and are seldom consulted about policy matters. And they are not likely to be appointed to committees dealing with curriculum, hiring, and tenure, even when such assignments would be a normal part of their responsibilities.

At the University of Washington, Philip Meranto, a tenured anticapitalist political scientist, was frozen out of all departmental decisions and department social life. Graduate students were advised not to take his classes. He was given the most cramped faculty office despite his senior rank and was subjected to verbal harassment from university police. He eventually resigned.

After serving for many years as a tenured senior faculty member of Queens College, CUNY, noted author and political analyst John Gerassi was moved to voice his displeasure at the treatment he had been accorded, including the case of my own candidacy. In a letter to his department colleagues, he wrote:

“I have never been asked to participate in anything meaningful in this department. For example, I have never been asked to be an adviser to graduates or undergraduates or [anyone else] . . . . Now since my colleagues tell me they like me, and I assume that they are not saying that just to humor me, the reason must be political. Indeed, I remember years ago when I informed my colleagues that a friend of mine who was nationally known, in fact internationally respected, Michael Parenti, who would be a great draw because of his reputation, was available for a job (at a time when the department was actually trying to fill a position), I was quickly informed that he would not be considered no matter what, and I was told in effect to stay our of department business.”

Gerassi concluded on an ironic note: “If nothing else, may I respectfully request that while all decisions may be made by a small group of my colleagues behind closed doors, do, please, let us know what those decisions are.”

The only radical to receive tenure in the department of philosophy in the 1970s at the University of Vermont was Willard Miller, a popular teacher, published author, participant in scholarly conferences, and political activitist. Though he prevailed in his battle for tenure, Miller was made to pay for it. He was denied promotion and remained an assistant professor for thirty-three years with a salary frozen for a long time at below the entry level of the lowest paid instructor. He was passed over for sabbatical for thirteen years and finally received a one-semester leave only after threatening court action. And he was perpetually passed over for reduced teaching load, a consideration granted to his departmental colleagues on a rotation basis. He died in 2005, still an assistant professor.

Campus activism did not pass away with the Vietnam era. Student protests have arisen against the nuclear arms race, the university's corporate investments in an apartheid-ruled South Africa, U.S. involvement in Central America (including the U.S. invasion of Panama), and the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq. There have been demonstrations in support of affirmative action, women's studies, and multiculturalism, and protests against racism, sexism, and Eurocentric biases in the curriculum. But such actions are rarely inspired by anything taught in the classroom, and often despite what is taught.

Facing a campus that is not nearly as reactionary as they would wish, ultra-conservatives rail about how academia is permeated with doctrinaire, “politically correct” leftists. This is not surprising since they describe as “leftist” anyone to the left of themselves, including mainstream centrists. Their diatribes usually are little more than attacks upon socio-political views they find intolerable and want eradicated from college curricula. Through all this, one seldom actually hears from the “politically correct” people who supposedly dominate the universe of discourse.

It was the novelist Saul Below, who denigrated preliterate societies by asking, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” When criticized for his Eurocentrism, Bellow fired back in the nation's most prominent newspaper: “We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.” Writers like Bellow, who enjoy every acclaim from conventional literary quarters and plum appointments at leading universities, and who criticize anyone they wish, apparently expect to remain above criticism themselves. And when opinions arise that challenge their unexamined biases, they have the major media through which they can reach wide audiences to complain about being unjustly muted.

Networks of well-financed, right-wing campus groups coordinate conservative activities at schools around the nation, and fund over one hundred conservative campus publications, reaching more than a million students. Such undertakings are well financed by the Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and other wealthy donors. The nearly complete lack of similar largesse for progressive groups further belies the notion that political communication in academia is dominated by left-wingers.

In addition, we witness the growing corporate arrogation of institutional functions, and increasing dependence on private funding, all of which militates against anything resembling a radical predominance. The university's conservative board of trustees dishes out extravagant salaries to top administrators along with millions of dollars in luxury cars, luxury dwellings, and other hidden perks for themselves and university officers. Meanwhile student fees are being dramatically increased, services slashed, and the numbers of low-paid and heavily exploited adjunct teachers (as opposed to fulltime professors) has increased considerably. No university is under leftist rule. The majority of students are from privileged backgrounds, careerist in their concerns, and lacking in the most basic information regarding the politico-economic realities in this country and abroad. As for the faculty, the majority are of mainstream or otherwise conventionally centrist political orientation. In the social sciences there are many more Bill Clinton Democrats than George Bush Republicans. In the business and engineering schools, and maybe also law and medicine, there sometimes are more conservatives. Conservatives seize upon the relative shortage of conservative faculty as proof of deliberate discrimination. This is an odd argument coming from them, Steven Lubet points out, since conservatives usually dismiss the scarcity of women or minorities in a workforce or student body as simply the absence of qualified applicants. That is not discrimination, they insist, it is self-selection. “Conservatives abandon these arguments however when it comes to their own prospects in academe. Then the relative scarcity of Republican professors is widely asserted as proof of willful prejudice.” Lubet continues:

“Beyond the ivy walls there are many professions that are dominated by Republicans. You will find very few Democrats (and still fewer outright liberals) among the ranks of high-level corporate executives, military officers or football coaches. Yet no one complains about these imbalances, and conservatives will no doubt explain that the seeming disparities are merely the result of market forces.

They are probably right. It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others. So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions—such as academics, journalism, social work and the arts—that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas. After all, teachers at all levels—from nursery school to graduate school—tend to be Democrats. Surely there cannot be a conspiracy to deny conservatives employment on kindergarten playgrounds.”

For years, mainstream academics scorned antiwar radicals and Marxists of every stripe. Now, ironically, some of these same centrists find themselves attacked by the emboldened student ultra-conservatives who complain that exposure to liberal and “leftist” ideas deprives them of their right to academic freedom and ideological diversity. What they really are protesting is their first encounter with ideological diversity, their first exposure to a critical perspective other than the one they regularly embrace. Conservative students grumble about being denied their First Amendment rights by occasionally being required to read leftist scholars. “Where are the readings by Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly?” complained one. They register these complaints with college administrators, trustees, and outside conservative organizations. Accusations of partisanship hurled by the student reactionaries are themselves intensely partisan, being leveled against those who question, but never against those who reinforce, conservative orthodoxy. Thus the campus headhunters act as self-appointed censors while themselves claiming to be victims of censorship.

In recent years, the underpaid adjunct teaching staff and heavily indebted student body have found still fewer opportunities for exploratory studies and iconoclastic views. The world around us faces a growing economic inequality and a potentially catastrophic environmental crisis. Yet the predominant intellectual product in academia remains largely bereft of critical engagements with society's compelling issues. Not everything written by mainstream scholars serves the powers that be, but very little of it challenges such powers. While orthodoxy no longer goes uncontested, it still rules. Scholarly inquiry may strive to be neutral but it is never confected in a neutral universe of discourse. It is always subjected to institutional and material constraints that shape the way it is produced, funded, distributed, and acknowledged. Money speaks louder than footnotes.

[Invader Zim]

E.H. Carr's work wasn't based on analyzing the Great Purges, the supposed "anti-semitism" of Stalin, Stalin's activities during WWII, etc.

True, however your underlying argument was that a historian of marxist sympathies and a pro-soviet union attitude would be disbarred from formal dicusssion of the Soviet Union under stalin, clearly that was not the case. As for your claims regarding precisely what Carr wrote, I have no idea. I do not pretend to have read all 14 volumes of his history, and I know at least one professional historian - who i won't name - of the period and region who hasn't because, and I quote, "life is too short". I am also entirely sure that you haven't read them either, nor would I bet that any single member of this board has employed them as bed time reading. That said, I know that Pipes attacked Carr because he felt that Carr's work was no different to 'holocaust denial', so go figure.

But this discussion is, of course, to miss the point. Why is it that an openly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union was able to write a full 14 volumes, get them published and be widely respected as a professional historian? Why would a sympathetic evaluation of the revolution, or any other part of SUs history up until the 1930s be acceptable to 'trot' and capitalist publishers and historians and not the rest of Stalin's career?


As Furr pointed out (http://www.anonym.to/?http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/horowitzlies.html) against Horowitz a few years ago:

All of which, wrongly I might add (I can provide you with a summary of my views of HE teaching in an alternative thread should you wish), provides apologism as to why an individual might be qualified to teach a subject; but what it does not do is establish why an individual may be qualified as an expert within the topic, or be considered as such.


Well as I said it came out merely days ago, so yeah.

But this is of course not Furr's first publication, which has presumably failed to go through the process of peer-review, on the Soviet Union. Is this the point where you inform us that that individuals such as Furr are sabotaged at the peer-review stage in a pernicious attempt to keep him silenced?


In response to some of the comments Invader Zim has made regarding academia in general, all I can say to the reader is obviously he has a completely distorted view of the university system. I shall now post an essay of Michael Parenti's on the subject. I typed this up myself, and to my knowledge, it can't be found anywhere else online at the moment. Any typos or grammatical errors are probably my fault.

You asserted that holding a sympathetic opinion of the Soviet Union would bring automatic ruin to a professional historian, I proved that to be false with several case studies. No number of articles you can produced will either defeat the fact that the historians I listed were A. sympathetic to the Soviet Union, or. B. highly respected historians with equally respected careers.

Are you going to address the fact you have been proven wrong or not?

[Fungy]

You asserted that holding a sympathetic opinion of the Soviet Union would bring automatic ruin to a professional historian, I proved that to be false with several case studies. No number of articles you can produced will either defeat the fact that the historians I listed were A. sympathetic to the Soviet Union, or. B. highly respected historians with equally respected careers.

Are you going to address the fact you have been proven wrong or not?

Ismail already dismantled your example of Hobsbawm. But allow me to attempt to tie this into what I just posted, and sincerely hope you go back and read (I think you'll enjoy it).

With people like Hobsbawm, where their field doesn't have anything directly to do with the USSR, there is a certain amount of protection (though you will probably still get persecuted if you're politically active or very vocal about it, again, read the article). After all, the stuff you are basing your career on doesn't directly deal with the USSR. So, within the bounds of being subject to academic ridicule, it doesn't directly relate to something your colleagues can claim you are a menace to the field for, something that you would be actively accused by your peers for deliberately misinforming your students about.

This minor "protection" you receive (which won't really protect you at all, just sort of limit the scope of how you can be persecuted by the people in your department), doesn't apply to the field of Sovietology. So not only do you have the stigma of having pro-communist views (and yes, in general, Trotskyism receives far less official flak than views that completely go against the grain of bourgeois propaganda), but your direct colleges are going to be the very people who rose through the ranks in a field basically founded as the anti-Soviet propaganda wing of Western governments, the very people mostly likely to engage in your persecution even if you weren't in their field! So how the fuck could one possibly expect to have a career in the field?

I mean, I really shouldn't have to spell it out in such an obvious manner. I can only assume, you must really think academia is a place where radical anti-capitalist analysis is tolerated, that the university system basically conforms to some idealistic vision promoted by the universities themselves, in much same way the news pretends to be objective. I can then only assume you don't think like a Marxist.

[Jose Gracchus]

It is true that there is deliberate selecting in the Establishment between different views. For instance, the SWP (US) and the CPUSA organized in very different milieus and with different objectives against the War against Vietnam - the CPUSA was considered openly pro-Soviet and a sister party to the Workers' Party of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the People's Revolutionary Party (NLF CP in South Vietnam). The SWP (US), though it organized against the war, had fewer limitations than those who could be openly identified with the Red enemy.

[Weezer]

Sectarian circle jerks.

Fun times.

[Ismail]

I do not pretend to have read all 14 volumes of his history, and I know at least one professional historian - who i won't name - of the period and region who hasn't because, and I quote, "life is too short". I am also entirely sure that you haven't read them eitherI actually have his book Twilight of the Comintern and have another book of his (Volume I of Socialism In One Country) in PDF format. I know others who have also read his unfinished book on the Spanish Civil War. He didn't write page-turners, but they are indeed informative. I've also read books where he's often cited in relation to economic matters. Don't be presumptuous.


But this discussion is, of course, to miss the point. Why is it that an openly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union was able to write a full 14 volumes, get them published and be widely respected as a professional historian? Why would a sympathetic evaluation of the revolution, or any other part of SUs history up until the 1930s be acceptable to 'trot' and capitalist publishers and historians and not the rest of Stalin's career?There's no real "issues" with the subjects Carr covered. No one disputes that the USSR became an industrial power, and you're not going to have people shrieking over his coverage of wage differentials during the early years of the NEP.

Again, the "Stalin" field is different. First off people like Robert Conquest and the rest are actually people whose books are popularly read. E.H. Carr's books today occupy a "niche" as academic reference material. I haven't seen any anti-communist say, "Hey, you think communism is so great? Read Leonard Schapiro's The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, you damn commie." That's a more "academic" anti-communist book. I have however been informed that I was clearly ignorant of Stalin's "crimes" by everyday anti-communists and should therefore read (this assumes I haven't) one of the following:


The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest, or alternatively his Harvest of Sorrow.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield.
If they're feeling more "learned," they suggest I read Solzhenitsyn.

And so on. It's a lot more controversial to say that Stalin didn't engineer the Great Purges or that he may have actually contemplated democratization of some sort than to say that he "might have" wanted to deport Jews to Siberia or that he allied with Hitler to defeat Europe.


But this is of course not Furr's first publication, which has presumably failed to go through the process of peer-review, on the Soviet Union.If you're particularly curious I could email Furr on this issue.

[Invader Zim]

I actually have his book Twilight of the Comintern and have another book of his (Volume I of Socialism In One Country) in PDF format. I know others who have also read his unfinished book on the Spanish Civil War. He didn't write page-turners, but they are indeed informative. I've also read books where he's often cited in relation to economic matters. Don't be presumptuous.

So, when I said you haven't read all 14 volumes of his history of the Soviet Union, I was correct. And as it happens I thought his 20 Years Crisis and What is History were entirely readable.


There's no real "issues" with the subjects Carr covered.

Really, that is quite a claim given you just informed us a paragraph above that you have not actually read more than a fraction of Carr's work. As it happens it is a fact that a great many of the rightwing historians who study the field dispise Carr's work because it was, in their eyes, apologism for the USSRs policy when it came to the 5 year plan and didn't demonise Stalin's policies. These are of course "issues" and issues which earned Carr a great deal of criticism and still do. But regardless, Carr also covered many more elements of Stalin's career. Yet the fact of the matter is that Carr was not censored, he was not prevented from obtaining and retaining highly presigious academic postions (save when he was screwing around), yet at the same time was both sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and arguably Stalin, in print as a professional historian. Your attempt to subtly redefine the issue by contending that Carr doesn't really count because he didn't deal with 'issues' you think are relevent, in the context of this discussion, isn't very convinsing in my opinion.

Incidentally, on a side note, I think you would enjoy Carr's July 1953 (an intellectual obitury I suppose) article on Stalin in volume 5 of Soviet Studies, in which he painted, though not uncritically (it is highly critical in some places), Stalin as an innovative successor, ideologically and intellectually, of the legacy laid down by Lenin.

E. H. Carr, 'Stalin', in Soviet Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, (Jul., 1953), pp. 1-7.


Again, the "Stalin" field is different. First off people like Robert Conquest and the rest are actually people whose books are popularly read. E.H. Carr's books today occupy a "niche" as academic reference material. I haven't seen any anti-communist say, "Hey, you think communism is so great? Read Leonard Schapiro's The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, you damn commie." That's a more "academic" anti-communist book. I have however been informed that I was clearly ignorant of Stalin's "crimes" by everyday anti-communists and should therefore read (this assumes I haven't) one of the following:

* The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest, or alternatively his Harvest of Sorrow.
* Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
* Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield.
* If they're feeling more "learned," they suggest I read Solzhenitsyn.

And so on. It's a lot more controversial to say that Stalin didn't engineer the Great Purges or that he may have actually contemplated democratization of some sort than to say that he "might have" wanted to deport Jews to Siberia or that he allied with Hitler to defeat Europe.

But we aren't discussing popular history - in fact popularity doesn't come into it at all. We are discussing whether it is possible for a professional historian to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union and still be taken seriously by fellow academic historian. What the general historically curious public think doesn't really come into it. Indeed our argument revoles around the question of whether Grover Furr's work is ignored by the majority of professional academic historians of the topic because there is a conspiricy of silence to keep communists marginalised from academia and serious intellectual discourse, or simply because Furr's work is shit and hasn't earned the respect of other academics.

[Ismail]

So, when I said you haven't read all 14 volumes of his history of the Soviet Union, I was correct. And as it happens I thought his 20 Years Crisis and What is History were entirely readable.I don't need to read all 14 volumes of his history to discuss what he focuses on in his books. I don't read the entire Bible, does that mean I don't generally know its contents and what the chapter subjects are?


Yet the fact of the matter is that Carr was not censored, he was not prevented from obtaining and retaining highly presigious academic postions (save when he was screwing around), yet at the same time was both sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and arguably Stalin, in print as a professional historian. Your attempt to subtly redefine the issue by contending that Carr doesn't really count because he didn't deal with 'issues' you think are relevent, in the context of this discussion, isn't very convinsing in my opinion.Using this logic the study of Uzbek women in the 1970's USSR is as controversial as the question of Stalin's role in the Great Purges and if Khrushchev blatantly lied about practically everything he said about Stalin. Saying that, for instance, Uzbek women were doing pretty good under the USSR in such a case is not the same as saying that Stalin was basically a good person and wasn't a terrible tyrant, and that practically every major negative thing said about him was wrong. The progress of Uzbek women in the 1970's USSR does not carry the same weight as the public perception of Stalin.


We are discussing whether it is possible for a professional historian to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union and still be taken seriously by fellow academic historian.Evidently the answer is yes. Unfortunately this isn't relevant to Furr, whose work isn't so much about the USSR as it is about Khrushchev's assertions about Stalin, which help form the basis of the mainstream view of Stalin himself.


Indeed our argument revoles around the question of whether Grover Furr's work is ignored by the majority of professional academic historians of the topic because there is a conspiricy of silence to keep communists marginalised from academia and serious intellectual discourse, or simply because Furr's work is shit and hasn't earned the respect of other academics.Well I myself didn't originate the "ignored by academia" issue. The book just came out, it got a positive review by a Professor (Thurston) whose field is Soviet history. That's good enough. Furr to my knowldge does not claim to be a serious Soviet historian, just as, say, Clement Leibovitz did not claim to be a serious historian on German and British foreign affairs when writing his book on Chamberlain's views toward Hitler (http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/inourtime.php). I don't see this having a huge bearing on anything, especially since his work is rather niche.

You seem to be just using "academia does not like Furr's book" as a cover anyway. I know from the past that you are not fond of Stalin in the least, and that you basically view Furr as another Irving with perhaps even less credentials.

[DiaMat86]

Communist Thoughts on March 5, the anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death in 1953

In the article from Pravda announcing Stalin's death in 1953. the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party vow to the heavens that they will continue Stalin's work.

The problem is: the people who issued this statement did NOT mean it. Certainly, not all of it. Much of this statement was hypocrisy.

As Stalin lay dying his old comrades in the Politburo assembled at his bedside and unilaterally -- without any vote by the Central Committee - DID AWAY with the resolutions of the 19th Party Congress. Specifically, they did away with the expanded Presidium, the clear purpose of which was to bring new blood into Party leadership.

Then they set about abandoning the resolutions of the 19th Party Congress of just a few month's before (October 1952).

The new Party rules were never put into effect. Stalin's final work, _Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR_, which had been the main topic of discussion at the 19th Party Congress, was quickly dropped -- forgotten about, never referred to again.

The Korean War was soon settled and the South Korean fascists given 1/2 the country they had lost.

The Vietnam War was settled in 1954 when the USSR forced the North Vietnamese to retreat to the North for the promise of free elections in 1956 -- which the USA never permitted. A reign of fascist terror soon swept the South of Vietnam.

Lavrentii Beria, who -- whatever else he planned -- brought the Party leadership under the rule of law, was illegally arrested and shot, as were a number of his associates.

Khrushchev took power. Everything he said was, of course, lies.

In short, the USSR leadership abandoned the struggle for revolution and communism.

* * * * *

Clearly, Stalin had been completely isolated among the Party leadership. Had he not been isolated, these reversals could never have happened virtually the minute he died.

It would be good to figure out how all this could have happened.

For too long the rote answer has been: "Khrushchev, a secret oppositionist, stole power." But that can't be the case.

Not only had Khrushchev been in the Politburo since 1939 (Candidate since 1938). NOTHING Khrushchev et al. did after Stalin's death was opposed by Central Committee members.

It was a long time -- several years -- before the old "Stalinists" Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, tried to get rid of Khrushchev. Too little, too late!

Besides, they went peacefully along with everything for several years before doing this.

* * * * *

So, on the one hand, the descent into total revisionism began the day Stalin died -- as we can now see.

On the other hand, SOMETHING -- some process -- came to maturity that day, and it had to be a very long time in gestation, in development.

Arch Getty gave his 1999 book _The Great Terror_ the following subtitle: "Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939."

On the one hand, Getty had the right idea. The roots of everything else, including Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, the roots of the abandonment of communism, reach AT LEAST back to the 1930s.

On the other hand, I do not think Getty can possibly be correct. He traces this "self-destruction" to the assassination of Kirov and the ensuing Moscow Trials of Oppositionists, the Tukhachevsky Affair, and Ezhov's reign of terror known as "the Great Terror" or "Ezhovshchina."

But those events themselves need to be explained. THEY also had to have roots, origins. Like all processes, these Oppositions must have had deep roots and a long period of development or gestation.

And now we are back to the 1920s, at least. Back to the period of Lenin.

But the political debates and struggles of the post-Lenin 1920s were already taking place while Lenin lived. They simply burst out more strongly once Lenin, who had somehow held everybody together, died.

Profound differences within the Party existed at the time of the Civil War, and at the time of the Revolution itself.

In my opinion they were related to the profound differences that caused the split in the Second, or "socialist", International at the time of WW1.

And THAT split started in the 1890s, with Eduard Bernstein's book of 1899 that codified, or clarified, the splits in the German Social-Democratic Party and so in the world socialist movement.

"Reform, not revolution" became Khrushchev's motto. But it had been Bernstein's motto in the 1890s. And Bernstein, while a very important leader, was also the spokesperson for a large part of the German SD Party, especially the Trade Union leadership.

Lenin's _What Is To Be Done?:_ (1902) was aimed at Bernstein-type revisionism, and at the German SD Party, which was the model every other socialist party tried to emulate, and which the Mensheviks were also trying to use as a model.

But the "social-democratic deviation", as Stalin called this in the 1920s debates, ran very deep in the socialist international (from which the communist international sprang), and within the Bolshevik Party itself.

* * * * *

So March 5, the anniversary of Stalin's death, is a good time to rededicate ourselves to Stalin's goal -- communism. And especially to rededicate ourselves to figuring out the answers to what, in my view, is the greatest question that confronts humankind, the working class of the world, you and me, today:

* What did the Bolsheviks do that was WRONG? that led to the disaster that began to unfold in an accelerated manner upon Stalin's death?

* What did the Bolsheviks do that was RIGHT? that we need to imitate and learn from in a positive sense?

If we really want to continue Stalin's struggle for communism and push it one or even many steps further in our time than our heroic predecessors did in THEIR time, we need to undertake this task, though struggle and study.

I hope these remarks are helpful, as I intend them to be.

[RED DAVE]

So March 5, the anniversary of Stalin's death, is a good time to rededicate ourselves to Stalin's goal -- communism.You've got to be kidding.

RED DAVE

[Jose Gracchus]

Even more bizarre when you realize PLP's main novel line is a dedication against some kind of "transitionary" state of socialism in order to bring about eventual stateless communism.

[DiaMat86]

Even more bizarre when you realize PLP's main novel line is a dedication against some kind of "transitionary" state of socialism in order to bring about eventual stateless communism.


Given past performance it is unlikely that socialism will lead to communism. It is bizarre is to expect a different outcome. In practice socialism is the system between capitalism and capitalism.

Capitalism to Socialism to communism is a faulty theory. Marx may have been wrong. Marx also thought revolution would come in the the industrialized countries first, it did not happen that way.

Do you know of any practice that has led to a different outcome?

[Jose Gracchus]

Given past performance it is unlikely that socialism will lead to communism. It is bizarre is to expect a different outcome. In practice socialism is the system between capitalism and capitalism.

Capitalism to Socialism to communism is a faulty theory. Marx may have been wrong. Marx also thought revolution would come in the the industrialized countries first, it did not happen that way.

Do you know of any practice that has led to a different outcome?

You're missing the point. Don't you see the contradiction between on one hand, denouncing reformists as misleading workers back to capital, yet you believe the socialist "'transitional' workers' state" is similarly misguiding the working class, yet feel the need to uphold Stalin? I mean in your theoretical schema, objectively Stalin would be misleading the working class just as Karl Kautsky did. I cannot think of any logical reason this makes sense, apart from identifying with your sect's origins in the CPUSA.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Even more bizarre when you realize PLP's main novel line is a dedication against some kind of "transitionary" state of socialism in order to bring about eventual stateless communism.

That's not novel. That's right out of the WSM's playbook. :p

No, their novel strategic line is the one on mass worker citizenship. Unlike their other strategic lines, it's many steps above the "voting in socialism" passivism of the WSM and above amateur "vanguardism" of most current left groups. However, I seriously doubt if they have substantive tactics to back this strategic line up. :(

[Invader Zim]

I don't need to read all 14 volumes of his history to discuss what he focuses on in his books.

No, but even a relative sample would be a good start.


Using this logic the study of Uzbek women in the 1970's USSR is as controversial as the question of Stalin's role in the Great Purges and if Khrushchev blatantly lied about practically everything he said about Stalin.

A strawman if there ever was one, and the fact is Carr did investigate highly controversial topics such as the 5 year plan.


Unfortunately this isn't relevant to Furr,

I fail to see why, if Furr's work was upto the standard demanded to be taken seriously by professional historians then they would have no choice but to take him seriously.


The book just came out, it got a positive review by a Professor (Thurston) whose field is Soviet history. That's good enough.

But where is this review? Which journal can I read it in?


just as, say, Clement Leibovitz did not claim to be a serious historian on German and British foreign affairs when writing his book on Chamberlain's views toward Hitler (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/inourtime.php).

And having read the drivel, you can tell. And the appeasement policy is hardly a niche topic.


and that you basically view Furr as another Irving with perhaps even less credentials.

Now that is unfair, it is true that Furr doesn't have any credentials, just a soap box; but Irving does have credentials but as a liar and fraud. I'm sure that Furr's work is drivel, hense the reason it hasn't made any splash what-so-ever in the field, but there is a difference between being an ideologue crack-pot shouting your apologism from the roof-tops and being a proven liar attempting to distort the historical record by deliberately mis-reporting sources.

[RED DAVE]

Given past performance it is unlikely that socialism will lead to communism. It is bizarre is to expect a different outcome. In practice socialism is the system between capitalism and capitalism.You are confusing stalinism/state capitalism with socialism.


Capitalism to Socialism to communism is a faulty theory.You're sure about that.


Marx may have been wrong.So might you be.


Marx also thought revolution would come in the the industrialized countries first, it did not happen that way.Actually it did. The first failed proletarian revolution took place in France.


Do you know of any practice that has led to a different outcome?Are you sure you belong on this website?

RED DAVE

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

The bogus nature of Furr's work was exposed in these threads a few months ago:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-article-shows-t132429/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/evidence-leon-trotsky-t132632/index.html

[The Vegan Marxist]

The bogus nature of Furr's work was exposed in these threads a few months ago:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-article-shows-t132429/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/evidence-leon-trotsky-t132632/index.html

:laugh:

Those threads didn't point out the "bogus nature" of Furr's work. All I saw were you and others trying to argue that Furr's work was of "bogus nature", with several bullshit claims that "Stalin collaborated with the Nazi's", the myth that "there's no such place as the 'Hotel Bristol'", which even Astinilats took the time in explaining how the hotel was not made up, and how we even had confessions through both Trotsky's and his son's archives of Trotsky being in contact with Holtzmann.

Even Ismail pointed out your b.s. rhetoric against Furr, with various misleading claims. These threads produced the same amount of evidence of proving Furr's work being "b.s." as were the Trots' "evidence" that the Moscow trial was fraudulent - 0%!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

TVM:


Those threads didn't point out the "bogus nature" of Furr's work. All I saw were you and others trying to argue that Furr's work was of "bogus nature", with several bullshit claims that "Stalin collaborated with the Nazi's", the myth that "there's no such place as the 'Hotel Bristol'", which even Astinilats took the time in explaining how the hotel was not made up, and how we even had confessions through both Trotsky's and his son's archives of Trotsky being in contact with Holtzmann.

Not so, Artesian found it quite easy to let the hot air out of his amateurish attempt to malign Trotsky.


Even Ismail pointed out your b.s. rhetoric against Furr, with various misleading claims. These threads produced the same amount of evidence of proving Furr's work being "b.s." as were the Trots' "evidence" that the Moscow trial was fraudulent - 0%!

Yes, a very convincing way to defend that Stalinist hack by dragging in yet another irrelevance.:rolleyes:

[The Vegan Marxist]

Not so, Artesian found it quite easy to let the hot air out of his amateurish attempt to malign Trotsky.

Artesian made it to where he couldn't take his Trotish b.s. that he made the mistake of saying certain things that led to his banning. He also never made any "amateurish attempt" because almost everyone disregarded the facts he was pointing out on the Hotel Bristol fact.


Yes, a very convincing way to defend that Stalinist hack by dragging in yet another irrelevance.:rolleyes:

You state that Astinilats was being amateurish, yet you resort to name calling on other people you disagree with, like Ismail, by calling him a "Stalinist hack". :rolleyes:

[pranabjyoti]

TVM, don't waste your time by arguing with Rosa, Artesian, Dave and the group. It's nothing but waste of time.
Their logic are like that:
Sun rises in the East.
Who declared that direction as East?:lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

TVM:


Artesian made it to where he couldn't take his Trotish b.s. that he made the mistake of saying certain things that led to his banning. He also never made any "amateurish attempt" because almost everyone disregarded the facts he was pointing out on the Hotel Bristol fact.

1. Artesian isn't a Trotskyist.

2. He hasn't been banned.

So much for you keeping track of the facts.:lol:


You state that Astinilats was being amateurish, yet you resort to name calling on other people you disagree with, like Ismail, by calling him a "Stalinist hack".

I called him no such thing.

In fact, as is clear from what I posted, I called Furr this.

Not too good with the facts, are you?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Pranabjyoti:


TVM, don't waste your time by arguing with Rosa, Artesian, Dave and the group. It's nothing but waste of time.

1. Especially when TVM can't even get basic facts right.:lol:

2. You certainly can't sustain an argument with me.


Their logic are like that:
Sun rises in the East.
Who declared that direction as East?

Yet more Stalinist invention.:lol:

[The Vegan Marxist]

He hasn't been banned.

So much for you keeping track of the facts.:lol:

I was talking about Astinilats, not Artesian.


I called him no such thing.

In fact, as is clear from what I posted, I called Furr this.

Not too good with the facts, are you?

I'd recommend you being a bit more clearer on that then, 'cuz it looked like you were calling Ismail a "Stalinist hack". And even when directing towards Furr, it's still a childish, amateurish thing to do IMO.

For what it's worth though, my apologies for mistaking your remark on Furr for Ismail.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

TVM:


I'd recommend you being a bit more clearer on that then, 'cuz it looked like you were calling Ismail a "Stalinist hack".

In fact I said this:


Yes, a very convincing way to defend that Stalinist hack by dragging in yet another irrelevance.


And even when directing towards Furr, it's still a childish, amateurish thing to do

Not if he is a Stalinist hack, as we can see from those two threads, and this one.

[Kiev Communard]

To USSR's credit, such great "democracies" as Great Britain and France had also tried to "appease" the Third Reich by concessions in 1935-1938 - with practically the same failed result as Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; Hitler's regime was simply too aggressive and irrational for even cynical imperialist powers to reach some temporary settlement with it, so I would say that in this case Stalin's and Western imperialism's cynicism and betrayal of their supposed principles are rather equal.

As to the "two-cults" iconography" DiaMat86 mentioned below, I would say that in my view the truly left-wing groups of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution were Workers' Opposition, Decists and Miasnikov's group, while Lenin and Trotsky (just like Robespierre and Marat in the French Revolution) were actually vacillating, having gone from their previous libertarian socialist vision of 1917 - early 1918 to basically Saint-Simone/Lassalle/Dühring style authoritarian state socialism, thus unintentionally paving road to more consistent statist Stalin's ascendancy.

In a nutshell, there could be said that there were two "Rights" in VKP(b) / CPSU: the first, "market socialist" one (exemplified by Bukharin/Kalinin/Rykov, later finding its expression in such disparate figures as Beria, Kosygin, Andropov, and finally Gorbachev) and the second, "state socialist" one, led by Stalin and his supporters, whose followers in later-time Soviet Union included Khruschev (despite Anti-Revisionist myth, he was still in favour of total state ownership, even though with devolved local bureaucracies' rights), Brezhnev, Suslov and Romanov (Gorbachev's rival in 1985). Both "Rights", despite their fundamental differences, were in essence bureaucratic, anti-workers' self-government groupings, the former aspiring to something approximating modern post-Dengist China, while the latter misguidedly equating socialism with the rule of bureaucratic class effectively controlling means of production.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Except we expect these 'western democracies' to behave in such unprincipled ways. What we do not expect is avowed Marxist states to copy them.

[Kiev Communard]

^^^Except we expect these 'western democracies' to behave in such unprincipled ways. What we do not expect is avowed Marxist states to copy them.

I am not defending Stalin, mind you. On the contrary, I have pointed out that his response to Hitler's threat in 1939-1941 was not that different from those of the liberal capitalist Great Powers around the time of Munich Pact.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Yes, I realise that, but try telling this (i.e., what I posted) to anyone defending the Stalinist regime.

[Die Neue Zeit]

To USSR's credit, such great "democracies" as Great Britain and France had also tried to "appease" the Third Reich by concessions in 1935-1938 - with practically the same failed result as Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; Hitler's regime was simply too aggressive and irrational for even cynical imperialist powers to reach some temporary settlement with it, so I would say that in this case Stalin's and Western imperialism's cynicism and betrayal of their supposed principles are rather equal.

My defense of Stalin's realpolitik in this episode, despite the purges, is precisely because of the Western appeasement. Ironically, the Cold War strategy of containing Soviet influence started with Stalin himself, since he proposed a strategy with the West for containing Hitler.


As to the "two-cults" iconography" DiaMat86 mentioned below, I would say that in my view the truly left-wing groups of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution were Workers' Opposition, Decists and Miasnikov's group, while Lenin and Trotsky (just like Robespierre and Marat in the French Revolution) were actually vacillating, having gone from their previous libertarian socialist vision of 1917 - early 1918 to basically Saint-Simone/Lassalle/Dühring style authoritarian state socialism, thus unintentionally paving road to more consistent statist Stalin's ascendancy.

For all his faults, Lassalle stressed independent political organization:

Ferdinand Lassalle: balanced assessment of a German workers' leader (http://www.revleft.com/vb/ferdinand-lassalle-balanced-t150158/index.html)

That's a lot more that can be said of either Stalin or Trotsky on Popular/United Frontism.


In a nutshell, there could be said that there were two "Rights" in VKP(b) / CPSU: the first, "market socialist" one (exemplified by Bukharin/Kalinin/Rykov, later finding its expression in such disparate figures as Beria, Kosygin, Andropov, and finally Gorbachev) and the second, "state socialist" one, led by Stalin and his supporters, whose followers in later-time Soviet Union included Khruschev (despite Anti-Revisionist myth, he was still in favour of total state ownership, even though with devolved local bureaucracies' rights), Brezhnev, Suslov and Romanov (Gorbachev's rival in 1985). Both "Rights", despite their fundamental differences, were in essence bureaucratic, anti-workers' self-government groupings, the former aspiring to something approximating modern post-Dengist China, while the latter misguidedly equating socialism with the rule of bureaucratic class effectively controlling means of production.

Typical Trotskyist accounts would put Trotsky on the left, Miasnikov and co. on the "ultra-left" (for the sake of insults), and Stalin on the "center."

Why do you not lump Brezhnev together with Kosygin, especially since he did not side with Kantorovich on the planning question?

[DiaMat86]

You are confusing stalinism/state capitalism with socialism.

You're sure about that.

So might you be.

Actually it did. The first failed proletarian revolution took place in France.

Are you sure you belong on this website?

RED DAVE


Ahh RED DAVE,

PLP is not a "Stalinist" party it is a communist party. Stalinism is a stick that right wingers use to bash Leninism. The proletarian revolutions failed because of right wing errors and insufficient military power.

I notice you refute everything but "Socialism is the stage between capitalism and capitalism".

Socialists mistakenly believe that the transition to communism is spontaneous or determinist "withering of the state". It isn't. Its a political struggle to the left. It needs to be analyzed who went wrong when and where. Or the same old mistakes will be repeated. LIKE IN THE REVOLUTIONS GOING ON RIGHT NOW.

[RED DAVE]

Socialists mistakenly believe that the transition to communism is spontaneous or determinist "withering of the state". It isn't.You're sure about that.


Its a political struggle to the left.You're sure about that.


It needs to be analyzed who went wrong when and where. Or the same old mistakes will be repeated.That's true, but stalinists don't have a clue about that.


LIKE IN THE REVOLUTIONS GOING ON RIGHT NOW.That's true, but stalinists don't have a clue about that.

RED DAVE

[Kiev Communard]

My defense of Stalin's realpolitik in this episode, despite the purges, is precisely because of the Western appeasement. Ironically, the Cold War strategy of containing Soviet influence started with Stalin himself, since he proposed a strategy with the West for containing Hitler.

Yes, that's why "Marxist-Leninist" foreign policy of "Comrade Stalin" in that case was no different from that of the imperialists he so loudly denounced during his hypocritical "Third Period".




For all his faults, Lassalle stressed independent political organization:

Ferdinand Lassalle: balanced assessment of a German workers' leader (http://www.revleft.com/vb/ferdinand-lassalle-balanced-t150158/index.html)

That's a lot more that can be said of either Stalin or Trotsky on Popular/United Frontism.

Still, it is Lassallean views that predominated in SPD and led to its toleration of state socialist schemata. While Lassalle was correct in opposing unity with bourgeois liberals of Progressive Party, his collaboration with Bismarckian policy of paternalist "domestication" of German workers was early precursor of Ebert/Scheidemann "unity" with German liberal-conservative bourgeoisie after 1918.




Typical Trotskyist accounts would put Trotsky on the left, Miasnikov and co. on the "ultra-left" (for the sake of insults), and Stalin on the "center."

That's why I am not a Trotskyist :D.


Why do you not lump Brezhnev together with Kosygin, especially since he did not side with Kantorovich on the planning question?

Actually Brezhnev and Kosygin were rivals in the power struggle within the ruling Politbureau that took place in early 1970s, with Brezhnev coming on the top. Kosygin was actually informal leader of local economic bureaucracy interested in more "independence" for "their" enterprises, especially in the sphere of capital investment, while Brezhnev and Suslov were the proponents of more "Stalin-style" top-down bureaucratic planning.

[Raubleaux]

I have read this entire thread and have not read a single word actually discussing the argument and evidence put forth by Furr in this book. Has anyone had a chance to look through it?

Despite the claims of some in this thread, Furr's work on the Soviet Union is very well informed and well-researched. I believe he used to post a lot on H-Net along with other historians and had some interesting debates. He is not a slouch when it comes to backing up his claims.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Not according to other knowledgeable comrades who post at this site:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-article-shows-t132429/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/evidence-leon-trotsky-t132632/index.html?p=1714051

http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-there-so-t144158/index13.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/question-trots-t148155/index.html

[heiss93]

If anyone in the NYC area wants to see Grover Furr speak about his book in person, he is going to be speaking to the U.S. Friends of the Soviet People, on Sun. Apr 3rd. See this thread for more details:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/4-3-grover-t151995/index.html?p=2057496#post2057496

[Jose Gracchus]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that a group calling itself "U.S. Friends of the Soviet People" still exist and presumably take themselves seriously.

[ComradeOm]

I'll say one thing for Furr: he knows his audience

[PottersvilleUSA]

Well I don't pretend to be an expert on Khrushchev but I do think he was one of the few leaders of that era who genuinely wanted to replace the cold war with peace. His sincerity in this regard made him a good counterpart for President Kennedy, who referred to himself as "'peace at any price President." Of course that's a big factor in the military industrial complex's decision to assassinate Kennedy. Wars are so profitable.

[pranabjyoti]

Well I don't pretend to be an expert on Khrushchev but I do think he was one of the few leaders of that era who genuinely wanted to replace the cold war with peace. His sincerity in this regard made him a good counterpart for President Kennedy, who referred to himself as "'peace at any price President." Of course that's a big factor in the military industrial complex's decision to assassinate Kennedy. Wars are so profitable.
Can you believe that we can achieve piece while imperialism is still strong and reigning? The way Khrushchev defined "piece" is letting the down weapon of proletariat before imperialism? THAT ISN'T ANY PIECE PROCESS, THAT'S SURRENDER.

[Jose Gracchus]

Which is why he moved ballistic missiles to Cuba to try to right the extremely unfavorable balance of strategic power in the 1960s? You mean like he accelerated development of intelligent programs while Stalin the Genius had dedicated extremely scarce and highly demanded post-war resources into flights of fancy like heavy gun cruisers when the war had demonstrated them to be obsolescent?

But of course, it is about some he-said, she-said drivel that Furr dug up, not any scrutiny of actual policy.

[PottersvilleUSA]

Can you believe that we can achieve piece while imperialism is still strong and reigning? The way Khrushchev defined "piece" is letting the down weapon of proletariat before imperialism? THAT ISN'T ANY PIECE PROCESS, THAT'S SURRENDER.

I'll give more context. Should have done that in my earlier post.

In the context of the cold war, which threatened to go nuclear hot, Kruschev clearly preferred peace over mass death, and peace over capitulating to his military hawks. That's clear in the letters he exchanged with President Kennedy who was a self-described "peace at any price" president.

The letters they exchanged were described in "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters" by James Douglass--by far the best book on the assassination of President Kennedy.

IMO Kruschev was way way better than the hawks and greedy military industrial complex types that surrounded him, much like Kennedy. There's only so much a sincere man of peace can accomplish in that kind of environment but they were both sincere. In return for his push for peace in Cuba, Vietnam and the USSR Kennedy paid with his life. Kruschev paid with a shortened career as leader of the Soviet Union.

[pranabjyoti]

I'll give more context. Should have done that in my earlier post.

In the context of the cold war, which threatened to go nuclear hot, Kruschev clearly preferred peace over mass death, and peace over capitulating to his military hawks. That's clear in the letters he exchanged with President Kennedy who was a self-described "peace at any price" president.

The letters they exchanged were described in "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters" by James Douglass--by far the best book on the assassination of President Kennedy.

IMO Kruschev was way way better than the hawks and greedy military industrial complex types that surrounded him, much like Kennedy. There's only so much a sincere man of peace can accomplish in that kind of environment but they were both sincere. In return for his push for peace in Cuba, Vietnam and the USSR Kennedy paid with his life. Kruschev paid with a shortened career as leader of the Soviet Union.
Your arguments showed how narrow minded and narrow visioned Khrushchev was. If he had little idea about world politics then, he could have understand that he will get support of a huge population of the world and together that with the military might of USSR would teach imperialism some good lesson. In such a scenario, why he is asking for piece with imperialism?

[Jose Gracchus]

God, you are an idiot. War would have meant the extinction of the USSR and its satellites at that time. The U.S. had an overwhelming strategic nuclear advantage. Wargaming by specialists have predicted that had the Cuban crisis gone hot, the U.S. would've lost maybe a couple cities, most, since the majority of the Soviet strategic arsenal was based on cryogenically-fueled open-air missiles with response times measured in days. Needless to say, it didn't take that long for the hundreds of strategic bombers that SAC could deploy to cross the Arctic and immolate the Soviet state. In the early 1960s, nuclear war was winnable and survivable for the U.S. The USSR needed time to build up a deterrent to where MAD was at least partially credible. We're talking about in a couple days, 90+% of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc population killed dead, while the U.S. survives as an empire intact with some ugly clean-up, but certainly less than the damage the USSR incurred in WW2. Hence Khrushchev's limited attempt to balance the odds by putting intermediate- and medium-range missiles in Cuba, and to buy time in the arms build up, as well as economic breathing room (since the USSR could not possibly compete militarily and meet development goals - as it did fail historically) via "peaceful coexistence".

But of course Uncle Joe with his dick-compensating fuck-off useless heavy cruisers (in the fucking 1950s!) was a king of sound strategic investment and face-off against the West. Ditto for his endless selling out of real communist struggles, including the Greek Civil War. Or hey, how about his own "peaceful coexistence" - the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. But oh, how I could forget. That was so necessary to buy time (and sell the Nazis raw materials and all kinds of commodities that aided the build up used against the USSR in Barbarossa)! So unlike Khrushchev and his gambits.

Say what you want about Khrushchev. He was not selling the West openly and deliberately the means to strategically attack and nearly destroy it. He was not incompetently investing and deploying scarce and vital Soviet resources against the enemy.

Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev's strategic decision-making were practical strokes of genius. You haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about. Oh yes, some mass of Third World militia + vestigial Soviet deterrent magically cancels out an American nuclear force which was practically itching for genocide? There were major policymakers who openly advocated for an all-out first-strike against the USSR, but I suppose that goes right over your head.

[Kléber]

I thought Khrushchev spread "socialism" to Algeria and Cuba. ;)

His regime definitely treated Soviet nationalities, and allies like China, in a Russian chauvinist way - but it wasn't Khrushchev who forcibly migrated entire peoples (1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union), 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi%E2%80%93Soviet_population_transfers)).

And he told the imperialists "we will bury you." That's a lot better than what Stalin said:


Howard : Does this, your statement, mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution?

Stalin : We never had such plans and intentions.

Howard : You appreciate, no doubt, Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has long entertained a different impression.

Stalin : This is the product of a misunderstanding.

Howard : A tragic misunderstanding?

Stalin : No, a comical one. Or, perhaps, tragicomic.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm

[Jose Gracchus]

If this doesn't show many Anti-Revisionists will cling in the most puerile and glazed-eyes fashion to their precious choice items of rhetoric and hearsay, I don't know what does.

Of course its clear say their childish attachment to which Great Man sat in the Big Red Throne reveals them to be anything but Marxist. "Silent revolution!" "Khrushchev Lied!" If Furr really wanted to prove something, maybe he could actually, I dunno, attempt at a materialist analysis of post-Stalin politics. But no, he-said, she-said is so much easier.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In the early 1960s, nuclear war was winnable and survivable for the U.S. The USSR needed time to build up a deterrent to where MAD was at least partially credible. We're talking about in a couple days, 90+% of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc population killed dead, while the U.S. survives as an empire intact with some ugly clean-up, but certainly less than the damage the USSR incurred in WW2. Hence Khrushchev's limited attempt to balance the odds by putting intermediate- and medium-range missiles in Cuba, and to buy time in the arms build up, as well as economic breathing room (since the USSR could not possibly compete militarily and meet development goals - as it did fail historically) via "peaceful coexistence".

But of course Uncle Joe with his dick-compensating fuck-off useless heavy cruisers (in the fucking 1950s!) was a king of sound strategic investment and face-off against the West. Ditto for his endless selling out of real communist struggles, including the Greek Civil War.

The Greek Civil War was a Stalinist thing, though. But yeah, it's an intra-Stalinist sell-out.

Stalin wasn't as gung-ho about his obsolescent cruisers as he was with Problem Number One. Without Beria and Problem Number One, Khrushchev and those around him would not have had the incentive to have an ICBM program.

The Khrushchev-era military's real innovation was the first ballistic missile submarine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_class_submarine).


Or hey, how about his own "peaceful coexistence" - the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. But oh, how I could forget. That was so necessary to buy time (and sell the Nazis raw materials and all kinds of commodities that aided the build up used against the USSR in Barbarossa)! So unlike Khrushchev and his gambits.

The selling part I don't like. The Pact itself, however, wasn't the problem.

[Jose Gracchus]

It doesn't take a genius to realize you have to prevent the U.S. from having a nuclear monopoly, so I hardly think he deserves some special credit for that. I realize it may seem nitpicky for me to keep bringing up the cruisers, but seriously, its amazingly stupid and incompetent, and I cannot imagine it happening under anyone else. They immediately dropped it after he died, so I can't imagine the Naval Fleet of the USSR was excited about it themselves.

How was the Pact principled? The Nazis had less of a capacity to carry the war through to the USSR in 1939 than the USSR had an ability to repulse it (to the extent they did not was entirely due to Stalin's incompetent strategic positioning - as exemplified by the incompetent placement of Soviet troops along the Nazi-Soviet border prior to Barbarossa - and his mass murder of the most competent tacticians and doctrinal specialists in the Red Army). The Pact was a massive dose of breathing room...for Hitler.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Keep being nitpicky about the cruisers. ;)

At least Khrushchev wasn't scared about the British "pwning" the German U-boats.

I wrote what I had to write about the Pact both earlier in this thread and in the Stalin Poll thread. Simply put: the West rebuffed Stalin. To add to this, the Soviets might not have been able to withstand a three-front defensive war: the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Finns (I didn't mention the Finns earlier).