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Mainstream, VOL L, No 45, October 27, 2012

Reply to Rajimwale’s Book Review

Wednesday 31 October 2012

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I would like to thank the editor of Mainstream for allowing me to respond to Mr Anil Rajim-wale’s review (“A Pathetic Defence of Stalinist Repressions”) of my book in the issue of August 4, 2012.

The full title and publication information of my book is:

Furr, Grover, Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every “Revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False Kettering, OH: Erythrós Press & Media LLC, 2011.

It is available from Amazon.com (USA), Abebooks.co.uk (UK), and the publisher, http://www. erythrospress.com/store/furr.html

Mr Rajimwale has seriously misconstrued my book. Contrary to what he claims, I do not “defend” the Moscow Trials, executions, “atrocities, repressions, tortures”; the Gulag (Khrushchev did not mention it in this Speech); “violations of democracy”; the murder of Trotsky; the “cult of personality”. Nor do I hint that Krupskaia may have killed Lenin.

Moreover, many of Mr Rajimwale’s state-ments about Soviet history in that review are false. Some of these errors may be lapses of memory. But I believe that on the whole his review reflects the version of Soviet history of the Stalin period that has prevailed since Khrushchev’s day. This false paradigm has been the subject of my research on Soviet history, including the book under review.

I begin my book by identifying the sixtyone accusations that Khrushchev made against either Stalin or Lavrentii Beria in his famous “Secret Speech”. Then I proceed to investigate each of them in the light of the primary documents made available since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, mainly from the former Soviet archives.

In my Introduction I tell how amazed I was to discover that 60 of the 61 accusations are demonstrably false (I could neither prove nor disprove the 61st). Moreover, I show that Khrushchev deliberately lied in at least 40 of these instances. I reproduce ample quotations from the primary sources, all translated by me from the original Russian. In many cases I put fuller texts and facsimile reproductions on my web page, providing the URLs in my book.

My book is, of course, unwelcome to anti-communists and Trotskyists. But not a single scholar of Soviet history has disagreed with a single point in my book. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” has no defenders. Four prominent historians provided brief laudatory comments, which may be found on the back cover.
Until voted out of leadership in October 1964 Khrushchev and his subordinates continued to invent and spread lies about Stalin. These false-hoods demoralised millions of Communists around the world. This was a body blow from which the communist movement never recovered.

No one lies when the truth is on their side. The fact that Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” is filled with falsehoods is significant in itself. Evidently Khrushchev could not find anything that Stalin had really done that was “bad” enough to include in his speech! Thanks to Khrushchev’s lies Trotsky’s version of the Stalin years gained a credibility it had never before enjoyed—and never deserved. Cold-War historians repeated the Khrushchevite lies in many languages, creating from them the “mainstream” historical account that is all but universal today.

In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev picked up where Khrushchev left off and, in fact, went much further in spreading lies about Stalin and the Stalin period in Soviet history. This “new wave” of anti-communist and anti-Stalin false-hoods and fabrications, including the creation of forged “primary sources”, continues to the present day.

During most of the 20th century the eyes of the world and the hopes of the exploited and oppressed everywhere were focused on the USSR. From the standpoint of the vast majority of humankind, the working classes, the Bolshevik Revolution, the industrialisation and collectivisation of the Soviet Union, the defeat of Hitler’s armies, the Comintern-inspired and -led struggles against imperialism—these were the greatest events of world history. And all these magnificent achievements took place during Stalin’s time.

The history of the Soviet Union during the “Stalin period” must be completely rewritten. What we have all been taught about the Stalin period of Soviet history is deliberate lies. The Trotsky-Khrushchev-Cold War-Gorbachev paradigm of Soviet history is not just fundamentally wrong: it was deliberately falsified from the outset. The archives are now slowly yielding the evidence essential to discover the truthful history that we all desperately need. In my books and articles I am trying to make a contribution to that vital task.

In addition to Khrushchev Lied, I recommend to your readers my other research on Soviet history of the Stalin period. Here is a partial list. All are available for downloading from my webpage, http://www.tinyurl.com/grover-furr-research, or simply http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/

• Grover Furr, “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan”, Cultural Logic (2009).

• Grover Furr, “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform” (two parts) in Cultural Logic (2005).

• Furr, Grover and Vladimir L. Bobrov, “Stephen Cohen’s Biography of Bukharin: A Study in the Falsehood of Khrushchev-Era ‘Revelations’” in Cultural Logic (2010).

• Furr, Grover, “Rejoinder to Roger Keeran”, ML Today, December 2011. This is my detailed reply to Prof Keeran’s critical review of Khrushchev Lied, which had appeared in the same online journal.

• Furr, Grover, and Vladimir L. Bobrov, “Bukharin’s ‘Last Plea’: Yet Another Anti-Stalin Falsification”. This is my translation of the Russian version, published in the online journal Aktual’naia Istoriia (“Current History”) in February 2009.

• Furr, Grover, “Baberowski’s Falsification”, Cyrano’s Journal Today, January 2010. An updated version of this article is also on my own web page.

• Furr, Grover, “The Moscow Trials and the ‘Great Terror” of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows”. Please note the links at the end of this article to many interrogation-confessions and to my English translations of them.

• Bobrov, Vladimir L., “The Secret of Ordzhonikidze’s Death” (2008).

• Furr, Grover, “Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939? (The answer: No, it did not.)”. The version on my own web page also has 20 pages of documentation.

• Furr, Grover, “(Un)critical Reading and the Discourse of Anti-communism”, The Red Critique 11 (Spring 2006).

A number of my published research articles are as yet only available in Russian. They are not listed above but are also available on my webpage. The most recent of these is an article (with my valued Moscow colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov) on the “Tukhachevsky Affair” of May-June 1937. In it we publish a document from Soviet archives, still top-secret in Russia, that strongly supports the large amount of other evidence now available that Tukhachevsky and the other Generals tried and convicted with him were guilty as charged of conspiring to overthrow the Soviet Government and Party leadership and had plotted with Germany and Japan.
My book on the murder of Sergei M. Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Party, is due to be out in Russian in the next few months. We now have a great deal of the investigative material from that case, though Russian authorities continue to keep some of it secret. From this large body of evidence, only available during the past several years, it is clear that Kirov was indeed murdered by a secret terrorist Zinovie-vite cell in Leningrad, just as the Soviet prosecu-tion charged in 1934. What’s more, this evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that the defendants in the “Zinoviev-Kamenev” Moscow Trial of August 1936 were in fact guilty as charged.
I have two books in preparation. The first is a detailed exposé of Professor Timothy Snyder’s celebrated but fraudulent book Bloodlands (2010). This is a strident attempt to depict the USSR as a mass-murderer second only to the Nazis. By means of checking every footnote in this book, many in Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German, I prove that Snyder’s book is a tissue of lies from beginning to end. My following book will be on Leon Trotsky during the 1930s.

In conclusion, I would like to urge your readers to contact me with questions, comments, and criticisms.

Grover Furr
Montclair State University
Montclair NJ 07043 USA
Email: furrg_nj@fastmail.fm

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