Khrushchev Lied But What Is the Truth? - Roger Keeran on Grover Furr.

[CT NIGHAVEN]

If I may,

It was Buharin, not Stalin, responsible for the deaths. It was not millions, but approx. 640,000, and THIS is recorded. As for the Gulag, it is Russian for correctional facility. It is said that Stalin sent people to the Gulag, instead of shooting them on the spot, and these people were traitors, murderers, what have you.

Thousands, not millions were victims, courtesy of Trotsky's acolytes. They are the scumbags. Stalin would actually disapprove of Obama's "socialism". He is a very dark figure, but the personal testimony by his own adopted son would surprise a lot of people. Stalin's bad rep came form Trotsky, and that man WAS a Marxist fucker. He called his own people, the white Russians, niggers. That, to me, is outright human bashing. Solzhenitsyn said the same thing.

Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag, and many German POWs wrote books on the Gulag, admitting it was better than their own prisons.

There's a saying: "To read too many books is a bad thing." In this case, the books written on the USSR are a thing of mystery, as very few people ventured there. I've read that some scientists who opposed the "consensus" that is ruining science fled to the USSR and had their theories accepted.

Stalin's theory said that you can't force people together, the opposite of multiculturalism. He wanted the identity of Russia to remain, as well as keep the other socialist states have their own identities. The primary evidence proves that Khrushchev was the one to ruin the image of Russia and her sister states, and that he was the one to give the Marxist ideology a bad name. That said, Marx never considered human emotion, and he himself hated niggers.

Bukharin and Beria did nothing without Stalin's approval. To do so would have been suicide.

[ambition_def]

Keeran made an example possible that in a sense vindicates Stalin. Not completely but makes things more understandable in this context through a citation of C. Wright Mill's work.

The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the difficulty that most Americans have in accepting revolutionary violence. In Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, Mills wrote as if a Cuban revolutionary were speaking to an American. In response to American outrage over the pictures of the revolutionaries summarily executing five or six hundred supporters of the dictator Batista without "a fair trial," the Cuban says:

This was war. During the Batista regime, thousands of our people were murdered....So what would you expect? Maybe in easy moral terms, no killing is excusable....But however immoral the purposes and the results of killing are quite different in different places and at different times. Because you see it does matter who is getting killed and why. But whether you think so or not, you certainly have no grounds for talking about injustice: Who gave any trial to the people of Hiroshima? Well, this, too, was a war. Remember, too, Yankee, that morals are easy to come by sitting in your quiet suburbs away from it all protected from it all. Morals are easy to say out [sic] when you're rich and strong and all the unpleasantnesses of the world are hidden from you—by distance, by amusements, by your own indifference, by your own private way of life.

It should go without saying that not everyone in a gulag was innocent. Espionage, conspiracy and betrayal were a reality in 1930s Russia. Objectively speaking if our current administration decided to go full betrayal with a gun grab, wealth redistribution and military coup we too would be looking at more extreme times. Extreme times call for extreme measures. Perhaps then many years on someone would look back at our extreme times and consider us barbarians for our actions. All from the safe confines of their time.

Well, that's basically what we are doing now. Safety in this sense gives us the false illusion that all enjoyed such a luxury. They did not. Failure to act could very well have meant an end to their own way of life and perhaps their very lives.

I do however think Stalin became paranoid and started eliminating anyone that smelled of traitor. This reached quite far across the country gathering up dissident ideological and even spiritual entities. He ruled with a broad sword rather than a scalpel. He is judged according to that.

I picked this out of Keeran's critique of Furr to specifically point to the dangers of revisionism. While Furr is correct that Krushschev flirted with bullshit, he also flirts with bullshit himself.

Take Furr's treatment of one of the most important episodes in Soviet history, the Kirov assassination. On December 1, 1934 in the Party headquarters in Smolny, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party of Leningrad, was shot in the head and killed by a Party member, Leonid Nikolaev.

Kirov was a supporter and friend of Stalin's, (the two had vacationed together the previous summer), and Kirov had been sent to Leningrad at least in part to counteract the opposition elements in the party there. The day after the assassination, Stalin went to Leningrad and took personal charge of the investigation, which ended up implicating the opposition leaders, G. Zinoviev and L. Kamenev, and set off the Moscow Trials and associated repression. In the secret speech, Khrushchev implied that Stalin was behind Kirov's murder.

Furr argues that Khrushchev's insinuation was baseless and that the opposition leaders convicted were in fact part of a murder conspiracy. Furr is right on the first count but fails to prove the second. Moreover, his refutation is superficial and tendentious. Furr's refutation takes up less than two pages and involves quotations from three historians, all of whom dispute Stalin's involvement in Kirov's murder.

One would never know from Furr's account that Khrushchev's implication became the conventional wisdom among such Cold War Sovietologists as Robert Conquest, The Great Terror,[25] and Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery.[26] In other words, a serious rebuttal of what Khrushchev implied would involve acknowledging what the Cold Warriors have written in support Khrushchev's view and then refuting or at least disputing it. Furr does not do this. He does not even identify two of the historians he quotes, Pavel Sudaplatov and Alla Kirilina. Furr neither provides their credentials (though strong), nor gives any reason that they are more credible (though they are) than Amy Knight or Robert Conquest. In other words, sometimes Furr has a stronger case than he bothers to make.

Moreover, Furr is highly selective about what he chooses to use from his sources. He fails to acknowledge, for example, that though the three historians he quotes disputed Khrushchev's view, none of them supported Furr's view. That is, none of them believe that the oppositionists convicted in the Moscow trials were guilty of Kirov's murder. For example, Kirilina dismissed Stalin's culpability for the murder but argued that Nikolaev was a lone assassin.[27]

A recent examination of the case by historian Matthew Lenoe (The Kirov Murder and Soviet History [2010]) relied heavily on the recollections of Genrikh Samoilevich Liushdov, one of the lead investigators in the Kirov case, who subsequently defected to Japan, and whose papers were examined by Lenoe in the Hokkaido University Library in Japan. Lenoe provided evidence that Stalin had nothing to do with Kirov's murder, hence proof that Khrushchev lied, but he also supported the lone assassin theory, hence not supporting Furr's view either.[28]

If Furr is right about the Kirov murder, he does not prove it here, and at best one will have to await his forthcoming study of the case. In spite of Furr's claim about "every" Khrushchev revelation being a lie, Furr actually does not dispute much that Khrushchev said about the repression. He does not question that mass repression occurred, that it was directed not just against Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and Bukharinites, but against "many honest Communists"; that the repression involved "the fabrication of cases against Communists," "false accusations," "glaring abuses of socialist legality," "barbaric tortures," and "the death of innocent people"; that 70 percent of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress were "arrested and shot" and a majority of the delegates to the 17th Party Congress were arrested; that on January 10, 1939 Stalin sent a telegram to various bodies declaring that "methods of physical pressure" were permissible "in exceptional cases"; and so on.[29]

Thus, while Furr accepts the major facts of the repression, he often quibbles over minor points, and without sufficient evidence, disputes the idea that everyone punished was innocent, and objects to laying the blame for the repression on Stalin (and Beria). Granted that many people besides Stalin carried out the repression and granted that Stalin played a role in ending the 1936-38 repression, the question remains how involved, aware and responsible was Stalin for the repression? If Khrushchev tried to shift total responsibility to Stalin, Furr seems bent on trying to deny Stalin any responsibility. In any case, Furr's reasoning and evidence on this point are dubious.

What I take away from this is that Communism in of itself is a bad design. Irrespective of Trotsky, Stalin or Lenin, the stalemate should not have resulted in so many deaths. If power was not so absolute the odds are much better for a non-violent stalemate. It did however because of central authority and the necessity for that seat to be filled while it exists. Regular Russians caught up in the middle of the conflict were slaughtered without any say in the matter. There was no due process. There was no jury or trial. They were just slaughtered. Centralized authority is the problem because it cannot sympathize. It cannot reason within the confines of subjective experience. It thinks objectively and thus it is very dangerous, prone to paranoia and deadly to the human condition. It seems plausible to me that within this large network of repression many innocent people paid with their lives. By whose hand is somewhat irrelevant. The stakes were immense and that seems to be the price paid for such power. It is always paid in blood.