Comrades positions on Furr's "Khrushchev lied "
Comrades positions on Furr's "Khrushchev lied "
I recently stumbled on take on the Khrushchev Lied https://mltoday.com/khrushchev-lied-but-what-is-the-truth/
And I wanted to know if this makes sense or am I missing something and what is known about the stances of Grover Furr
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There's a lot of arguing against arguments no one made here, all with the fervour of an old man yelling at clouds.
-Khrushchov didn't literally lie about everything. So what? As the author agrees, he lied a great deal. In no language is the title "Khrushchov lied with every breath" nor does Furr make such a claim. This is unserious.
-We don't know beyond question whether Zinoviev et al were responsible for the assassination of Kirov. It's true. What we do know however is that Khrushchov and a host of anticommunist hostorians have tried in vain to prove Stalin was behind it or to clear the convicted of this. In the presence of this and the absence of any evidence to indicate the testimonies were so much as implausible, I'm leaning strongly toward Furr's position. It may not be proven rigorously, but then again, it can't be in either direction with the present evidence.
-Furr doesn't clarify that some historians he quotes don't agree with his conclusion. ...Ok? That's not how citations work.
-The repressions point is odd, in that the author explicitly claims Furr's trying to have his cake and eat it too, by arguing first that the repressions were carried out by Yezhov, Khrushchov etc, and that they were guilty anyway. This isn't the case. Furr definitely argues the first, it might even be argued he leans too hard to the point of absolving Stalin of what was going on under his nose, but the second isn't. Arguing that the repressed were all or most guilty would've undermined the point of the book far beyond what someone going against the concensus could've gotten away with.
-Stalin wasn't completely opposed to torture. Again, so what? Furr didn't claim the man had 21st century hindsight and knew as we ought to, that torture isn't just morally wrong, but also practically unjustifiable. He merely argues against the image Khrushchov is trying to conjure up, which is a dictator who was happy to torture millions.
That's as far as I got. The article is right in one criticism I already laid down, the book goes a bit too heavy in implicitly absolving Stalin of wrongdoing in the repressions. That's the only good one before the part I reached. All in all, poor cririque.
So, just to see I understood correctly, in your analysis the book is moslty solid with maybe an overzealous defense of Stalin in a few points, and the text I found does bring up said overzealousness but it engages in some pointless hair splitting that sounds a lot like angry padding, is it?
Good way to put it, very well done. That's exactly what I meant in a way I couldn't have said it.
Good points. The article gets better after that part, though. I wrote a very angry critique of the first bit, by the time I'd got to the same point, then tempered what I wrote after reading the rest of the article. Essentially the article finishes by arguing that Stalin was more responsible than Furr allows for but that was a good thing because he was a revolutionary and needed to be ruthless.
Could've been written by someone who stood by Stalin all those years even after their party fell apart on hearing Khrushchev's speech, and was a little bit pissed off that Furr was implying that such a decades-long defence was unnecessary because Stalin didn't actually do what he was accused of doing. Given that supporting Stalin after the Speech could've been an employment-ending take, I wouldn't be surprised that my hypothetical author is a little angry lol.