Truth and lies about Stalin - An exclusive interview with Grover Furr

On the ocassion of the 140th birth anniversary of Joseph Stalin we asked Professor Grover Furr to share with us his thoughts on some issues surrounding Stalin and the period of his leadership. Grover Furr, a Professor of medieval english literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey, is well-known for his research and writings on a vast range of issues about Soviet history. Some of his most famous books include "Khrushchev Lied", "The Moscow Trials as Evidence", Trotsky’s "Amalgams", "The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, The Solution" and others. The name of Grover Furr is included in the list of the "101 most dangerous academics in America".

V.I. Lenin- The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War

Vladimir I. Lenin - The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War.

Published in Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915.

Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1974], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280. 

Republished from Marxists Internet Archives.

During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.

This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).

J.V. Stalin - Trotskyism or Leninism? (1924)

Joseph V. Stalin- Trotskyism or Leninism?

Speech delivered at the Plenum of the Communist Group in the A.U.C.C.T.U., 

November 19, 1924;

Published on Pravda, No.269, 

November 26, 1924.

Published via Marxists Internet Archives.

Comrades, after Kamenev's comprehensive report there is little left for me to say. I shall therefore confine myself to exposing certain legends that are being spread by Trotsky and his supporters about the October uprising, about Trotsky's role in the uprising, about the Party and the preparation for October, and so forth. I shall also touch upon Trotskyism as a peculiar ideology that is incompatible with Leninism, and upon the Party's tasks in connection with Trotsky's latest literary pronouncements.

Trotsky’s Lies - What They Are, and What They Mean

Trotsky’s Lies - What They Are, and What They Mean

By Grover Furr*.

The personality and the writings of Leon Trotsky have long been a rallying point for anticommunists throughout the world. But during the 1930s Trotsky deliberately lied in his writings about Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. My new book, Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’, discusses some of Trotsky’s lies that have fooled people, and demoralized honest communists, for decades. 

In January 1980 the Trotsky Archive at Harvard University was opened to researchers. Within a few days Pierre Broué, the foremost Trotskyist historian of his time, discovered that Trotsky had lied. Trotsky had always denied that any clandestine “bloc of oppositionists” including Trotskyists, existed in the Soviet Union. Trotsky called this an “amalgam,” meaning a fabrication by Stalin. This “bloc” was the main focus of the second and third Moscow Trials of January 1937 and March 1938. Broué showed, from letters in the Trotsky Archive by Trotsky and by his son Leon Sedov, that the bloc did exist.

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II). Continue from Part I.

Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

Objectivity And Persuasion.

Political prejudice still predominates in the study of Soviet history. Conclusions that contradict the dominant paradigm are routinely dismissed as the result of bias or incompetence. Conclusions that cast doubt upon accusations against Stalin or whose implications tend to make him look either “good” or even less “evil” than the predominant paradigm holds him to have been, are called “Stalinist.” Any objective study of the evidence now available is bound to be called “Stalinist” simply because it reaches conclusions that are politically unacceptable to those who have a strong political bias, be it anticommunist generally or Trotskyist specifically. The aim of the present study is to examine the allegations made in the USSR during the 1930s that Leon Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan against the USSR in the light of the evidence now available. 

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part I)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan.

Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

“If an objective research project on the events of those years were to be done, free of ideological dogmas, then a great deal could change in our attitude towards those years and towards the personalities of that epoch. And so it would be a “bomb” that would cause some problems. . . .”

Col. Viktor Alksnis, 2000.

“. . . it is essential for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of these fictions is verifiable fact. Whether the Nazi gas ovens existed or not can be established by evidence. Because it has been so established, those who deny their existence are not writing history, whatever their narrative techniques.” – Eric Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 57.

“. . . we can demolish a myth only insofar as it rests on propositions which can be shown to be mistaken.” – ibid., p. 60.