Grover Furr: The Fraud of the "Testament of Lenin"

Speech by Professor Grover Furr to the Institute for the Critical Study of the Society (ICSS) of Oakland, California, on his book "The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin" (Erythros Press and Media, 2022). You can watch the video of the discussion here: https://youtu.be/3qkB_EDabMc

I’d like to begin with this short preface. Persons who are, or were, in or around the “Old Left” are usually more or less familiar with the allegations of crimes levelled against Joseph Stalin by anticommunists and Trotskyists. My talk today is directed mainly to you.

 

140 years since the Haymarket affair in Chicago: The struggle for the eight-hour day

This year marks 140 years since the Haymarket Affair, a pivotal episode in the struggle for the eight-hour working day and the development of the modern labor movement.

In the late 19th century, industrial workers in the United States typically worked 12 to 14 hours a day under demanding and often dangerous conditions. The demand for an eight-hour day gradually became a central objective of organized labor. 

Holocaust Remembrance Day and the erasure of Jewish communist partisans: The case of Leon Tager

Leon Tager (with the white shirt, center) with his comrades, 1941.

Leon Tager, a Bulgarian communist of Jewish origin, was held in a forced labor camp in his homeland until June 24, 1941. Two days after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Tager did not wait for instructions from his party, which he had joined in 1933. He broke into the camp’s storage facilities, stole a backpack filled with explosives, and escaped.

Six days later, a massive explosion was heard, followed by flames engulfing the fuel depots of the Bulgarian port city of Ruse. 

What If Cuba Had Nuclear Weapons? The Limits of “Peaceful Coexistence”

By Nikos Mottas

Today, more than six decades after the Cuban Revolution, the United States continues to enforce one of the most prolonged and comprehensive systems of economic warfare in modern history. The blockade—tightened, codified, and expanded over decades—seeks not merely to pressure, but to suffocate. 

Sanctions on fuel, financial strangulation, extraterritorial enforcement, and constant efforts to disrupt Cuba’s access to energy and trade are not isolated measures; they form a coherent strategy aimed at exhausting a society that refuses to abandon its chosen path.  

80 years since Fulton: Churchill’s imperialist manifesto against Socialism

By Nikos Mottas

On 5 March 1946, less than a year after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill stood before an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and delivered the speech that would soon be known as the “Iron Curtain” speech. 

In Western political mythology, the address is often portrayed as a prophetic warning about Soviet expansion. In reality, it was something quite different: a calculated ideological declaration of hostility toward the socialist world and one of the founding political acts of the Cold War.

The fall of the USSR was a tragedy for humanity, but not the end of history

By Nikos Mottas

On 26 December 1991, when the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, the world did not merely witness the dissolution of a state. It witnessed the victory of counterrevolution—the temporary triumph of capitalism over the most advanced historical attempt to abolish exploitation and class rule. The fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not the end of an experiment that had “failed,” as bourgeois ideology insists. It was one of the greatest tragedies in human history precisely because it interrupted a process that had transformed the lives of hundreds of millions and reshaped the global balance of class forces.

10 reasons why Stalin is at the heart of anti-communist propaganda

By Nikos Mottas 

No political figure of the twentieth century has been attacked with such persistence, intensity, and ideological unanimity as Joseph Stalin. From conservative anticommunism to liberal moralism and large parts of the so-called “democratic”  left and various anti-Stalinist currents (Trotskyists, Eurocommunists, and related tendencies), hostility to Stalin functions as a shared point of convergence. This is not the result of historical curiosity or ethical sensitivity. It is a political necessity.

Stalin is targeted not primarily for what he did, but for what he represents: the most advanced historical challenge ever posed to capitalism and imperialism.

Grover Furr: The Betrayal of the Communist Movement in the Soviet Union

Speech by Professor Grover Furr to the Institute for the Critical Study of the Society (ICSS) of Oakland, California, on the subject "The Betrayal of the Communist Movement in the Soviet Union": 

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, communists had always believed that the only way a socialist state could be destroyed was by hostile forces from the outside. Now we know that this was tragically wrong. The Soviet Union was destroyed by betrayal from within. 

The Battle of Meligalas: Revolutionary Justice Against Collaboration and Fascism

 By Nikos Mottas

In the closing months of the Second World War, Greece was on the brink of liberation. Nazi German forces, facing defeat on all fronts, began withdrawing from the country. Yet in the Peloponnese and other regions, their presence was maintained through the actions of local collaborators: the Security Battalions (Tagmata Asfaleias). These battalions—composed of Greeks—had fought not against the occupiers but against their own people. Armed, trained, and supported by the Nazis, they were tasked with crushing the communist-led resistance.

Communist Party of Britain on EU's "Black Ribbon Day": A shameless and cynical falsification of history

In a statement posted on the Party's social media pages on Sunday 24 August, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) condemns the blatant falsification of history by the European Union, on the occasion of the so-called "Black Ribbon Day", which is observed annually on 23 August as a "Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes".

The Communist Party stresses out:

"They have become communist": The 1993 Yeltsin-Supreme Soviet standoff and the dirty role of the US

Following the victory of the counterrevolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian leadership under Boris Yeltsin proceeded to harsh economic reforms (known as “shock therapy”), thus causing, among others, inflation, unemployment, and severe public discontent. 

Within this context, a growing conflict between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) over economic policy and division of powers began to unravel. The Supreme Soviet resisted capitalist reforms and pushed back against the increasing presidential authority.

 

The Nuclear Holocaust in Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Lies of the Imperialists

By Nikos Mottas 

Eighty years have passed since the United States, under the administration of President Truman, committed one of the most barbaric crimes against humanity – on August 6th in Hiroshima and a few days later, on August 9th in Nagasaki – by dropping the atomic bomb resulting to hundreds of thousands victims and many more in the following years due to the radioactivity effects. 

Grover Furr's Khrushchev Lied is perhaps one of the most important books of the 21st century

By Nikos Mottas

Khrushchev Lied, first published in 2011, is definitely the most emblematic work of Grover Furr, an American Professor of Medieval English Literature at Montclair State University who has devoted years of research on Stalin-era Soviet Union. 

Before going to the book itself, it is significant to underline that Furr isn't an ordinary historian who relies on the dominant narratives and “sacred truths” of bourgeois historiography. On the contrary, he carefully challenges those narratives and “truths”, applying a dialectical approach on history and seeking for the actual facts one by one, usually using an enormous list of thoroughly-searched, primary and secondary, sources.

Honoring Aris Velouchiotis, 80 years since his death

By Nikos Mottas

The 16th of June 2025 marks the 80th anniversary since the death of the iconic Greek communist guerrilla Aris Velouchiotis. 

A member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and First Captain of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) during World War Two, Velouchiotis has been a legendary personality of the Greek Resistance against the Axis occupation. 

Abraham Benaroya: The Jewish pioneer of Socialism in Greece, one of the "fathers" of the KKE

By Nikos Mottas

Abraham (Avraam) Benaroya was born to a Shephardic Jew family in 1886 in Bidin, in the then Principality of Bulgaria, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. He began studying at the Faculty of Law in the University of Belgrade, but didn't graduate; instead, he became a teacher in Plovdiv. Being a polyglot, Abraham was fluent in at least six languages, including Ladino, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, English and Turkish.  

European Communist Action: 80 years since the Anti-Fascist Victory of the Peoples

Joint Statement of the Parties participating in the European Communist Action on the 80th anniversary of the Great Anti-Fascist Victory of the Peoples:

"May 9, 1945 marks 80 years since the Great Anti-Fascist Victory when Nazi Germany surrendered and the peoples of the world, with the decisive role of the Red Army and the Soviet Union under the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as the organizer and inspirer of this struggle, brought fascism to its knees across Europe. 

80th anniversary of the Anti-Fascist Victory: When the Communists saved humanity from the Nazi monster

By Nikos Mottas

“Anyone who loves freedom, owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid”. This phrase of Ernest Hemingway encompasses the whole symbolism of the 9th May 1945; the day of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples.

80 years have passed since the day when the red flag with the sickle and hammer raised over Reichstag, in Berlin, thus marking the triumph of the Red Army and the Soviet Union over the monster of Nazism-Fascism.

KKE denounces European Union's new anti-communist initiative for the "European Day of the Righteous"

In a statement, the EU Parliament Group of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) denounces the new initiative of the European Union which equates Communism with the monster of Nazism. 

More specifically, the KKE statement (here in Greek) reads:

"With the EU Commission being the initiator of a debate-parade of anti-communists in the plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the EU is working on another anti-communist and unhistorical 'day of remembrance' under the name of 'European Day of Righteous'.

Joseph Stalin on Winston Churchill’s Speech at Fulton

Towards the middle of March, 1946, a “Pravda” correspondent requested Joseph Stalin to clarify a number of questions connected with Winston Churchill’s famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, U.S.A. Below are J. V. Stalin’s replies to the correspondent’s questions.

Question: How do you appraise Mr. Churchill’s latest speech in the United States of America?

Answer: I appraise it as a dangerous act, calculated to sow the seeds of dissension among the Allied States and impede their collaboration. 

80 years since the disgraceful Varkiza Agreement

The signing of the Varkiza Agreement, 12 February 1945

On this day, February 12, 1945, the negotiations between the representatives of EAM and the Plastiras government were concluded and the unacceptable Varkiza Agreement was signed.

In the negotiations, the EAM delegation consisted of G. Siantos (Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and head of the delegation), M. Partsalidis (Secretary of the CC of EAM) and l. Tsirimokos (General Secretary of the Union of People's Democracy party). The government was represented by I. Sofianopoulos (Minister of Foreign Affairs), P. Rallis (Minister of Interior) and Ioannis Makropoulos (Minister of Agriculture).