:haram: or :halal: ?
It's alright in terms of anti-communist history books as Kotkin actually uses a lot of primary sources properly to tell the story of Stalin's youth and the world he was in.
I want to note that Kotkin's a reactionary and he heaps praise on the reactionaries leaders of the white army while marginalizing the fact they're antisemitic, and that they've done the same thing as the Bolsheviks when they were forced to utilize war communism - and often did worse when they stumbled on villages that had communist sympathizers.
Also don't bother with his next two books as he goes from being a fairly truthful if deceptively biased to objectively diving into the anti-communist cold war warrior deep end. He does the muh holodomor is as bad as the Holocaust*, the gulags are like nazi death camps, and Stalin, whom he wrote about in the first book as a rather thoughtful and intelligent man, lost his fucking marbles and started killing everyone around him for no reason.
So short answer? First book's okay. You could read other things that are written by better people, but as a sort of primer on the world Stalin grew up in and a perspective on how and why he developed as he did through his life the book is acceptable.
- (to fill some info about Kotkin's hot takes, in the second book he insists that the Soviet famine of 1932-33 was caused by Stalin in some way, shape, or form making him personally responsible for all the suffering and deaths that resulted from that period. But Kotkin cited no evidence of Stalin’s policies or actions causing the famine.)
Do you have any good recommendations? I'm interested in the history but don't know how to dig through the propaganda pile to find someone worth reading
You looking for general history or more autobiographical works?
John Reed's "ten days that shook the world"
China Mieville's "October"
Geoffrey Robert's "Stalin's Library"
Felix Chuev's "Molotov Remembers"
Quite literally anything written by Anna Louise Strong
Henri Barbusse's "Stalin"
And lastly Domenico Losurdo's "Stalin: A history and critique of a black legend"
Those should be satisfactory and educational on the early Soviet period.
The first three and a lot of Strong's works are probably the easiest or most interesting to read. You might need to lookup a bunch of groups or names though because the writers will be mentioning stuff groups or people did and thought from almost a hundred years ago, so just be aware.
first off I just wanted to say "lmao wtf" at the fact "Link to a transcript of the Russian original." is broken as fuck.
And to actually engage with your question, I'd say he's a mixed bag. To put it succinctly, he's like the ultimate academic tankie debater in that he's passionate about citations, citations of citations, citations of citations of citations, etc. to reach conclusions on whether or not they're relevant and reputable primary sources or bogus primary sources by systematically comparing primary sources to see if they validated chain of historical evidence (like a historian saying Lenin liked cats and citing not just Lenin but also the many people in Lenin's life to support the assertion he liked cats) or whether they're primary sources but are nebulous in lacking supporting primary sources (like a historian saying Lenin likes dogs and showing a picture of Lenin smiling while petting a dog, but doesn't cite other primary sources) or whether they're primary sources but are contradicted by other primary sources which in turn draws doubt on the veracity of the truthfulness of the source (A historian citing a British ambassador saying Lenin spoke English with a lowlands English accent while many other primary sources contradict that statement by saying Lenin spoke English with an Irish accent).
In being a person that goes through citations like Trump goes through mcdonalds burgers, he tends to be in his writings quite nitpicky and particular with how other historians use their citations. I'll write up a section of Furr's writing and let you formulate your opinion on him after reading his work for yourself.
In the First Moscow Trial of August, 1936, Trotsky was accused of forming a "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites." By "bloc" was meant a political alliance for concerted action between clandestine opposition groups operating illegally within the Soviet Union. The aim of the bloc was the overthrow of the Stalin leadership.
Trotsky always denied that any such bloc existed of that he would have ever considered forming such a bloc with what he called "capitulators" - those who had publicly renounced their support of the Trotskyist opposition and promised future support for the Bolshevik Party line. Since Khruschev's day the existence of this bloc has been denied by the Soviet, then Russian, governments, and by all scholars of Soviet history whether Soviet, Russian, Western anticommunist, or Trotskyitst.
In January, 1980, the Trotsky Archive at Harvard University was opened to researchers. Almost immediately a research team directed by Pierre Broue, in his day the foremost Trotskyist historian in the world, discovered that a bloc of RIghts, Trotskyists, and other oppositionists, had indeed existed and that Trotsky had approved it.
Shortly thereafter, American scholar Arch Getty discovered other documents in the Harvard Trotsky Archive that proved that Trotsky wrote to the former oppositionists - "capitulators" -- in 1932, undoubtedly to urge them to return to opposition. Trotsky swore that he had not contacted them and would never do so. Again, Trotsky lied. Throughout the '80s and '90s Broue went on to discover other lies by Trotsky.
Kotkin cites Broue's research. He must also know Getty's 1985 article on the Trotsky Archives, which was published in Soviet Studies, the foremost vehicle in the world for research in Soviet history. But Kotkin does not inform his readers what this research proves - that during the 1930s Trotsky lied consistently about his activities. Trotsky lied in his Bulletin of the Opposition; in all his articles and books; in his supposed "refutation" of the 1936 Moscow Trial, the Red Book. Trotsky lied to the 1937 Dewey Commission, and the Commission members believed him. (Citation 2: For a detailed study of Trotsky's lies at the Dewey Commission hearings of 1937 see Furr, Trotsky's 'Amalgams', Chapter 17 and 18; Furr, Dewey Commission.) (And a note from Alaskaball: Heres one of my own personal quibbles with furr is that he constantly references his other books to his reader to purchase and read when he references other topics outside of whatever book of his you're reading. Like damn bro, you really got that marketing down to a science. Also the following passage below is from Kotkin.)
Is This A "Lie"? If Not, What Is?
- Note 19 (912): Stalin had the OgPU blackmail or entice Trotsky supporters internally exiled in the USSR to denounce him to the Soviet press. Radek signed a denunciation of Trotsky that was published in Pravda (July 13, 1929). See also Broue, "Bolshevik-Leninist Faction," 140; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 390; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 281; Yaroslavskii, "Etot son Knochen [This shoulld be "konchen" - GF]," 2; RGASPI, f.17, op. 3, d. 782, 1. 9. Even Beloborodov and Ivan Smirnov would publicly break with Trotsky. Pravda, Nov 3, 1929. Rakovski, in Astrakhan, nearly alone remained loyal; Trotsky kept a photograph of him on his dest.
Kotkin has fabricated this -- literally made it up! there is no evidence that the Ogpu compelled Trotskyists to "denounce him." Neither Deutscher, loc. cit., nor Broue, loc. cit, say anything about this.
Broue, "Bolshevik-Leninist Faction..." was published in 1988. It has nothing at all about the OGPU [after 1934 renamed NKVD] either "enticing" or "blackmailing" oppositions to "capitulate," much less to denounce Trotsky. On the contrary: by 1990 Broue had concluded that the "capitulations" were false.
- Lev Sedov called the Smirnov group either the "former capitulators" or the "Trotskiite capitulators." **Everybody had known, from 1929 on, that people in the Smirnov group had not really capitulated but were trying to fool the apparatus, and were capable of organizing themselves as an Opposition within the party: the fact was so universally known that Andres Nin, the Spaniard deported from the Soviet Union in August 1930, explained it openly to his German comrades of Die permanente Revolution who printed his declaration without apparent problem. (Citation 3: Pierre Broue. "Party Opposition to Stalin (1930-1932) and the First Moscow Trial." In John W. Strong, ed. Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1990, pp. 98-111., 104. (Broue, POS))
Kotkin cites this very article! So Kotkin knows that the supposed "capitulations" were phony. That means Kotkin's claim that "Stalin had the OGPU blackmail or entice Trotsky supporters internally exiled in the USSR to denounce him in the Soviet press" constitutes deliberate deception of his readers - there is no other way to explain it. If this isn't a lie, what is?
Why would Kotkin, like Khruschev's men and then Gorbachev's men, do this? No doubt because the existence of the clandestine "bloc of Rights and Trotskyists" was one of the central charges in the Moscow Trials, and Trotsky had consistently denied that any such bloc existed or could exist. Therefore, to acknowledge that it really did exist would dismantle the allegation, universal among Trotskyists and anticommunists, that the Moscow Trials were frame-ups fabricated by Stalin.
The above section came from chapter 4 of Furr's book "Stalin Waiting for ... The Truth", titled: Trotsky and the Bloc (page 85). It's basically a super elongated form of "So you said this and cited it with that. Here's why your own citations says you're full of shit" that lots of historians generally engage in when having academic slap-fights. Of course because these are primarily focused on the history of the Soviet Union, it tends to skewer heavily towards the anti-communist writers being the authoritative figures of how to present sources in "unbiased" ways and labels anyone that goes against the grain with red-baiting by doing anything as bizarre or pro-communist as saying something as mild as Stalin wasn't actually a bloodthirsty asiatic barbarian but actually was a book nerd who probably would've been a librarian in another life.
I suppose to come to an actual conclusion on what I think on Furr, I'd say he's an interesting read but if you want to keep yourself intellectually honest you should examine his citations and citations of citations etc, to see if he's being honest with his sources or if he's doing what he also accuses Kotkin of doing.
I've only read Khrushchev Lied, so can't comment on all his work. It's very well cited. I've noticed I rarely see anybody actually criticize the content. They just point out that he is a professor of Medieval lit and not of history, it seems like bourgeois credentialism worship to me. One can write good history without being a professor of it, or even being in academia at all. And lets be honest, you aren't getting anything pro-Stalin published in a western academic press lmao.
I'd say October, Ten Days, or a lot of Strong's books tend towards more general history, with ten days covering the revolution before the civil war, October covering the civil war, and Strong's works covering a lot of the mid to late 20s and early 30s
just note that ten days is a first-hand accounts of a journalist, october's a more generic overview, and many of strong's works are also journalistic first-hand account with interviews of people over there. you can see an example of Strong's work in this partially archived post. If you or anyone wants I can type up the chapters of any of the books I have for anyones perusal.
All I know is that Kotkin is supposed to be pretty conservative, but even he admits that the Ukrainian Famine wasn't intentional.
No, it was Kotkin. Iguess in Stalin vol 2 he addresses the famine?
There are two flavors of anti-communism when it comes to the famine, you have the Holodomor myth that's pushed by ukrainian fascists to create a mythology of persecution to justify their scapegoating of russians in their borders and you have the anti-collectivist myth where anti-communist historians having access to the truth in the soviet archives overemphasize the planned industrialization and collectivization as the primary factors of the famine while marginalizing the sabotage conducted by expropriated kulaks, and the still primitive farming techniques that made it difficult for farmers to combat agricultural pests and diseases
Kotkin has no sympathy for the communists. In that passage we can see he falls into the second camp by laying it flatly at Stalin's feet that it was Stalin's deliberate actions of collectivizing and industrializing that 'accidentally' caused the famine. Of course, being inconsistent, Kotkin had through out the book openly blamed the Soviet program and Stalin: Stalin's Famine (subtitle, 127), Stalin's famine, involving extirpation of capitalism and denomadization, was incomparably worse (127), All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. (128-9), Once Stalin caused the horror, even complete termination of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine (129), Stalin had caused a domestic calamity and rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable in the face of Japan's expansionism...(129), Marxist imperatives of transcending capitalism - combined with inordinate willpower - brought apocalypse (191).
Lets also talk about a bit of dishonesty in Kotkin's citations: Many Contemporaries, such as the ITALIAN AMBASSADOR WHO TRAVELED THROUGH UKRAINE IN THE SUMMER OF 1933, DEEMED THE FAMINE DELIBERATE ^471. Monsterously, Stalin himself made the same accusation - accusing peasants of not wanting to work ^472 (128). In citation 472, Kotkin says Stalin's stance on the famine was that the peasants were starving because they didn't want to work. The work he cites is an article of Michael Ellman who states that according to a doctor in Kiev "leaders and rank-and-file workers" - notice there's no stated names nor statements on which level of leadership that doctor was referring to - were blaming peasants who did not work for their starvation. Ellman also wrote a letter to Mikhail Sholokhov noting that Stalin had said that some peasants had refused to work, which in turn threatened to starve the workers in the cities and the red army. In that same article Ellman also writes "Stalin's idea that he had faced a peasant strike was not an absurd notion indicating paranoia. It seems that there were really numerous collective refusals by collective farmers to work for the collective farms in 1932; see Kondrashin & Penner, Golod, chapter 3. [Ellman, note 9, p837]. In that Kondrashin & Penner citation the chapter 3 referenced was "They raised, but they did not harvest" From this one citation we see Kotkin who has read the Ellman article has read all of this but chose to omit all this information to his readers knowing many of them are casual readers and not historians who do the tedious work of checking citations :citations-needed:
Added note: I'm thinking about it now but barring someone being willing to slog through Conquest of all shit historians to check whether or not he's actually abandoned his propagandist position in favor of being somewhat historically accurate, I'm retracting my comment saying Conquest saying the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 wasn't intentional as my memory's fuzzy.
OMG the citing of an Eye-talian ambassador's opinion is actually causing me psychic damage
Sorry I misunderstood. I thought we were talking about another kotkin book.
