Grover Furr is amazing at digging up crazy documents from Soviet archives, but he then extrapolates the content of those documents to a ridiculous degree. He's not a historian (he teaches Medieval English literature in New Jersey) and his work isn't taken very seriously by the historical community at large. I would take anything you read in his works with a heavy grain of salt.
The best source on Stalin, specifically dismantling a lot of the Western anti-communist myths about Stalin as an evil dictator, is Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend. He's a well respected Italian Marxist scholar and he used a ton of primary sources to paint a flattering portrait of Stalin that isn't disconnected from reality and shows he was a flawed individual, like all of us. You can read it here, as it has never been officially published in English due to its controversial nature.
If you read between the lines Trotsky's Stalin is actually quite good, especially on Stalin's earlier years. Just take a lot of what he says about Stalin's "barbaric nature" and shit like that with heavy skepticism. Books by Ronald Grigor Suny and Moshe Lewin, both English-speaking Soviet historians, are generally very good.
In general if you see a writer compare the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany in any kind of systematic way, disregard their opinion entirely. Likewise if they talk about how the Soviet Union was "evil." If a historian is inserting broad sweeping moral judgements like that into a work of history about things that aren't even a century old you can be sure they have an axe to grind and are not going to give you a remotely accurate account of how things were.
That Losurdo book looks awesome, I'm definitely putting that on my reading list.
it has never been officially published in English due to its controversial nature
I myself am somewhat skeptical of Grover Furr, but he has a point that you simply cannot portray Stalin as anything other than a monster in Western historical study, it's simply not allowed. And this is great proof of his point. The thing is, Furr isn't the type of person who should be examining Stalin (and I think he would possibly agree with that), but no one else is doing it or there's roadblocks put in the way of people who might want to. He's right that if you try and deviate from this position on Stalin in the West at least, you get punished. And someone like Kotkin can write whatever he wants about Stalin and not get any pushback because no one even bothers to examine Stalin critically.
Oh for sure, I'm glad Furr exists and support his overarching goal of revisionist history in hegemonic Western academia. I love Losurdo's book because he starts with all these amazing quotes of figures who just years later would call Stalin "evil tyrannical maniac" all praising Stalin as a titan and a hero upon his death. Really covers how quickly and how totally the image of Stalin was dragged through the mud for propaganda's sake.
Yup there's an English translation out there that's been looking for a publisher for years. It's quite good, but they just released in online as a PDF because nobody wanted to publish it.
I was looking for comments I remembered that explain Furr really well and realized it was one of yours. https://hexbear.net/post/110328/comment/1221996
OP check that out for a good example though also quite a few people here have given some nice critiques of Furr and the ever important fact that he is NOT a historian
lol yes, I like Furr but always feel the need to add that disclaimer since above all we must be materialists!
I've gotten to the point that any approval I have for his translations has been wholly soured by just how rabid a lot of online MLs have been in citing him and his polemics as fullproof marxist histories.
So much so that now people have sorta fooled themselves into thinking Parenti is that way as well, which couldn't be further from the truth
Fair enough, he does get vastly over-memed over other serious historians. Parenti as well, while a wonderfully polemical writer, is not a historian and his works like Blackshirts and Reds could do with some editing and citations for his more out there claims.
Yeah his second book "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941" covers the famine.
Let's see, are you looking into a general overview of the Stalin period, anything specific, primary sources from the period, or more like random shit? For that last one I put out a bunch of random shit from that period in the /c/Marxism page.
For more specifics I'd have to wait until I get off work to cite books in my library. I can recommend the book Henri Barbusse wrote. Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme or as its known in english Stalin: A New World Seen Through the Man
If you want a more "unbiased" work, Kotkin's first book on Stalin is probably one of the better cold war warrior books out there. Even Grover Furr acknowledged the first book as being generally true to historical fact with little distortion. Just be aware that Kotkin's a reactionary that praises the white army butchers while glazing over their crimes against humanity while hyperfocusing on every slight the Reds ever did. @riley can attest to that since we both are going through the book.
This and this are from Ludo Martens. They're good too.
Furr is a land of contrasts. He does indeed to good work by cross-examining the sources many cold war warriors use to either debunk them as non-primary source hearsay, or primary sources distorted by the authors, etc. If you do read any of his stuff take his own words of advice to heart: examine any primary source presented to you personally to verify it's truthfulness. If someone like Robert Service write a book about how Stalin purposely targeted the ukranians for genocide by starvation and then cites Mark Tauger's study, then if you must examine Tauger's study to verify Service's claim. (Tauger says it was a shit harvest as a result of drought and disease that were the primary cause of the "holodomor" btw). The same goes for anything Furr writes, if you read his books then examine his sources.
I'll probably write another comment when I get home. You can also @ me if you have questions
I read a bit of both kotkin's second book then skipped over to Furrs book on the second book to read the general synopsis of both, and put them both down to read other books. Kotkin's second book basically went full cold war warrior, loosing a lot of the relative objectivity the first book had on Stalin as a man and veers off more towards Stalin as a caricature.
Furr basically echos this and says more or less if you're a serious communist intent on learning about the man and the history around him the first book was good enough with the successor two after it being serious can of :brainworms: . More or less said if you want to torture yourself you can keep reading, or you can read kotkin and furr side by side since furr said his book basically spends the whole time cross-examining Kotkin's book.
Follow up comment on books
Molotov Remembers by Felix Chuev, This Soviet World by Anna Strong, twenty letters to a friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva, The Politburo - the men who run Russia by Duranty, Russian Justice by Marcy Callcott, Stalin's Kampf by "written by himself" edited by M.R Werner, Joseph Stalin a short biography compiled by G.F Alexandrov and Co., fraud famine and fascism by Douglas tottle, Stalin's Library by Geoffrey Roberts, The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich, The Third Reich at War by Richard Evans, Hitler's army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich by Omer Bartov.
That's what I have at home, not accounting for more books I'm trying to get.
You can also check out Stalinism.ru for more random info, although for some reason I can't access it rn. Some people say they can so hopefully do can you
Yeah, I share your concerns about finding good history books. Since I don't have access to these archives, nor know how to read Russian, I mostly just have to trust that a historian is using a source honestly and accurately. I also have to guess who to trust when an internet commenter says X is a good historian and Y is a bad one.
