GenZedong

I think he's great. He backs up his research with lots of good primary and archival sources and he is one of the few voices pushing back against the anti-communist historiography that has sadly become accepted as the norm. Obviously he has a bias, but then again so do all historians whether they admit it or not. None of his detractors are able to actually prove him wrong with any solid evidence. They end up resorting to circular sourcing from other anti-communist propagandists and anti-Stalin myths that have simply over the decades become axiomatically accepted in western academia despite dubious or nonexistent evidence and if you dare question them you are accused of being a "Stalinist". Even after the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s to researchers ending up outright debunking many of these narratives a lot of western so-called historians continue to peddle the same nonsense.

Imo i think all communists should at least hear what Furr has to say and not automatically dismiss him without even looking at the evidence and arguments he presents and just writing him off because his conclusions don't align with the biases and "commonly accepted truths" that we have been taught by our deeply anti-communist educational system.

He's good.

The 'most rational' critique of him that I came across is that he is not an historian. The 'critic' implied that as history is not Furr's expertise, his work is sub-par. This could indicate serious problems with Furr's work.

But:

1. This criticism gives away the critic's bourgeois world outlook and their inability to treat history as connected to other fields. If they were a Marxist, they would see that a Marxist English literature professor would work with history, political economy, etc, because Marxists see these fields as interrelated.
2. The 'argument' is the height of arrogance and can be reworded: "leave history to the historians". It's a self defense mechanism, because if people take Furr seriously, it means that leaving history to the historians was a mistake because they missed what an 'amateur' spotted. All this is quite embarrassing for bourgeois historians because it suggests they have not been researching in good faith.
3. I've only read Khrushchev Lied. Furr might have produced less rigorous history because he is not a historian. Unfortunately for the bourgeois critic, any flaws in his rigour are negligible. The whole text is fully referenced and, even more condemning for the bourgeois critic, his sources are included in the appendices. So any reader can make their mind up as to whether he is right or wrong.

His conclusion is measured. The argument in Khrushchev Lied is that Khrushchev lied in his 'secret speech'. He does not argue that Stalin was right or never made mistakes. He dismantles the foundation of the anti-Stalin paradigm. For this reason, Furr will always be slandered.

The so called secret speech is the one that led to rifts in communist parties in the imperial core. It was this speech that gave e.g. Trotskyists an upper hand. Khrushchev's lies vindicated almost everything Trotskyists had been saying for years. The Marxist-Leninists who had supported Stalin were silenced. That support was now taboo. And the left in the West fell apart.

Considering that most modern knowledge about Stalin comes from either Trotsky or Khrushchev, Furr provides the evidence that most of that knowledge is incorrect. He performs a mass reductio ad absurdum to a huge swathe of anti-communist arguments.

If Khrushchev lied about Stalin's record, then what did Stalin do? We may never know. But we can now simply laugh at bourgeois historians whose work can be traced to or relies on Krushchev's speech, because we know they are wrong. And if they persist, at least they have identified themselves as an agent of the ruling class.

Bourgeois historians are clowns. I was reading Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe's Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist and the first half is actually alright. He recounts:

• The prewar fascist party summits they attended in Italy alongside the ustaše, under the tutelage of the Italian and German fascists
• The June 30th OUN declaration of an independent Ukrainian fascist republic and welcomed hitler's remake of Europe
• waffen ss galacian unit
• How the OUN political officers went to the peasant villages and could rally militias out of them
• Their role in galvanizing Ukrainians in the occupied territories to ethnic violence
  • Victims of this violence would go on to call all involved banderites
• Their role in the Lviv pogroms
• Detailed how the OUN pogroms were against Jews, Roma, and Poles living in the occupied territories
• Their presence in the police of the occupied territories despite the ban from nazi leadership
• Their immediate postwar collaboration with British and American intelligence

In the postwar section of the book, focusing on the remainder of the OUN "behind enemy lines" in Soviet Ukraine this clown goes on to say Soviet propaganda created a distorted view of the OUN among citizens of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet "propaganda claims" include:

• OUN was a group of hitlerite dogs
  • They literally swore fealty to him and had a unit in his army but okay..
• All Ukrainian nationalists were OUN
  • Does it really matter if the person participating in the pogrom is a card carrying member or not? The victims themselves call these people banderites and the OUN political officers in towns and villages were tasked with "political education" rallying these people to violence. While not card carrying OUN members, they did follow its political program...
• The OUN was an enemy of the Soviet Union that was conspiring with the capitalist powers to destroy the Union.
  • I don't even know how you claim this is made up Soviet propaganda in the chapter immediately after the one that details the OUN's collaboration with western intelligence and participation in Operation Rollback. Activities not meant to destroy the Soviet Union include air dropping OUN militants into Ukraine to being conducting guerilla warfare. Fortunately the KGB had agents in both the OUN and Mi6 and the airdropped clowns were never heard from again.
• It was antisemetic (citing Tim Snyder omegalul) and that the Soviet Union downplayed the Holocaust by saying the OUN were enemies of the Soviet people who murdered Soviet citizens
  • Not even sure the leap of logic here. Pogroms led by the OUN killed Jews, Roma, and Poles. All of whom were or would become citizens of the Soviet Union.
  • The OUN also was unable to make ideological inroads with the Eastern Ukrainians who had lived first in Tsarist Russia, and then in the new Soviet Union and considered writing them off and outright genociding them as well.
  • The stay behind terrorists did kill local Soviet authorities, people they thought were "collaborating" with them (using the very flexible and paranoid definition fascists often do), sabotaged the collective farms, and killed workers on said collective farms. So yes they literally did kill Soviet citizens.

He did thorough research and his book is a good read on the OUN that I still would recommend, but my god the object permanence goes away when the Soviets are mentioned lmfao

Khrushchev is apparently back and giving out random downvotes.

I haven't read much Furr, but as far as the common accusations of "historical revisionism" go...

ALL history books are attempts at historical revisionism. What else is the point of writing a history book if not to recontextualize and revise how we see historical narratives? Any "serious" historian that charges another historian with "revisionism" for offering counter-narratives is a clown.

That's not to say that a scholar altering cold hard facts should go without challenge (that douchebag Stephane Courtois), but Furr doesn't do this. Like others have pointed out, his work is well sourced, much of it from the Soviet archives, which when declassified disproved so many anticommunist myths.

Given Furr's reputation though, I would only feel comfortable bring his name up in leftist circles. If you're in a discussion with some left-sympathetic liberal on the cusp of a breakthrough and want to recommend an esteemed historian that challenges the "Evil Stalin" narrative, I'd recommend Ludo Martens.

Pretty fuckin based. https://youtu.be/gxYdGSIP0d0

I listened to his interview on prols of the round table podcast. I just ordered 4 of his books from some thriftbooks site that had good reviews (didn't want to go through Amazon cause of obvious reasons). I'm now a little miffed because it's been 10 days and I still haven't even had more order shipped and my paranoid brain isn't sure if their site just sucks of if some capitalist bootlickers are purposely not processing my order due to the nature of the books. lol

I have heard his name many times, but I don't really know anything about him. But if those are the types of people criticizing him, I am interested in what he has to say 😁

He tells so much truth that he needed to be smeared the most of all writers.