Stalin: História crítica de uma lenda negra

by Domenico Losurdo

La figura di Stalin occupa una posizione centrale nella storia del Novecento. Dittatore sanguinario ma anche organizzatore di un impero dalle dimensioni immense, creatore dei gulag e distruttore dei lager nazisti, cinico manipolatore degli ideali di rinnovamento sociale e oggetto di un culto della personalità senza precedenti, il giudizio sul "georgiano di ferro" ha seguito da vicino la fortuna del suo personaggio fino alla condanna definitiva dopo la caduta del muro di Berlino. Con un saggio di Luciano Canfora, Domenico Losurdo torna ad analizzare il mito di Stalin per descriverne l'ascesa e la caduta.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Biography, Russia, Soviet Union, Theory

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism.

He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.

From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.

Reviews

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is a masterpiece. Far and away my favorite Losurdo book so far, because it's rigorous, bold, and unyielding in its search for truth and correction of history. It charts the path taken by historiographers to link Stalin to Hitler as "twin monsters" and uses an incredible amount of evidence to show that the leaders of the West (the US and UK in particular) have far more in common with Hitler and Nazism more generally. He's not afraid to criticize Stalin, but he's careful in applying the correct historical context (WWII and the Second Time of Troubles) that helped me understand both Stalin and the Soviet Union so much better. I was particularly interested in the section on antisemitism, and I LOVED how he ends the book with a section on China and how Mao has become the new demon after China's meteoric rise on the world stage.

(side note: embarrassing that Verso refuses to publish this, lmao)

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE book on Stalin. Losurdo systematically dismantles the bourgeois hegemonic narratives around the Stalin Era in the USSR, and does it with a brilliant comparative method which demystifies a period usually cloaked in a thick haze of ideology. With a broader and deeper historical terrain than that of Grover Furr's work (which is still quite good), Losurdo does not shy away from what real violence did occur, but places it in a context which makes clear the extraordinary geopolitical situation of the first half of the 20th century. Losurdo is one of the best and most meticulous critical historians of recent memory.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As late as 1965, despite doing so from a position of harsh condemnation, Louis Althusser credited Stalin with having opposed the “madness” which claimed “making strenuous efforts to prove language a superstructure”: thanks to these “simple pages”, concludes the French philosopher, “we could see that there were limits to the use of the class criterion.”

“With great intellectual honesty and exhibiting the new and rich documentary material available due to the opening of the Russian archives, the author here quoted arrives at the following conclusion: “the Moscow Trials were not a senseless and cold-blooded crime, but Stalin’s counterblow in the sharpest of political battles.”

“Naturally, today Stalin and his collaborators’ condemnation of the opposition bloc as a nest of enemy agents seems grotesque, but we must not lose sight of the historical context broadly presented here.”

“There is much more: “The idea that the February Days were a ‘bloodless
revolution’ — and that the violence of the crowd did not really take off until October — was a liberal myth”: this is one of the most persistent myths about 1917, “which has now lost all credibility”

“A few years later, in 1927, Walter Benjamin, describing Moscow, incisively pointed out “the strong national sentiment that Bolshevism has developed in all Russians without distinction.”

“The subsequent collectivization of agriculture did not end with the condemnation of treason; this, precisely during the mid-1930s, found its organic expression in Trotsky’s book dedicated to the “revolution betrayed.”

“In similar terms, Gramsci distinguishes between “cosmopolitanism” and “internationalism”, which knows and in fact must know how to be at the same time “deeply national.”


“Stalinism” was not in the first place the outcome of an individual’s thirst for power or an ideology, but rather the permanent state of emergency that had taken over in Russia since 1914.”

“It is necessary in any case to assert—as one of the authors of the Black Book of Communism contradictorily recognizes—the need for “integration of Bolshevik political violence first and Stalin’s political violence later, within the ‘long duration’ of Russian history”: it is necessary to not lose sight
of “the generative ‘matrix’ of Stalinism represented by the period of World War I, the Revolutions of 1917, and the civil wars taken altogether”.

“Though “strange” it may have seemed, “the Gulag was slowly bringing ‘civilization’—if that is what it can be called—to the remote wilderness.”

“At least until 1937 in the Gulag “many unnecessary deaths” were caused by disorganization.”

“They attempted to “re-educate” the prisoners, transforming them into Stakhanovites ready to participate at the frontline of the country’s development, and with patriotic enthusiasm... It is no coincidence that, until 1937, the guards addressed the prisoners as “comrade.”

“Thus we discover another aspect that the usual historical comparison leaves hidden: the concentration camps which in the 20th century also developed in the liberal West, and assuming horrible forms.”

“Precisely for this reason, as pointed out by a recent study, “the terror cannot be construed solely as a series of orders issued by Stalin” and his accomplices. In fact, “popular elements” acted in it as well...”

“Indeed, “there was no contradiction between repression and democracy in the political psychology of Stalin and his followers”, and in this sense we can even speak of a “democratization of repression.”

“Occasionally, Stalin and his closest collaborators were forced to intervene to contain and channel this fury, warning against the tendency to look for traitors and saboteurs everywhere and in doing so destroy party and union organizations.”

“In the Gulag, it has been estimated that in the early 1930s, before the turn of the screw brought on by the murder of Kirov and the intensification of the dangers of war, the annual death rate “was about 4.8 percent of the total prisoner population”.

“If Europe was destined to end a policy of discrimination, denationalization, and oppression of minorities, the colonies and their national awakening were destined to radically put into question the concentration camps built by the conquerors for the races they considered inferior.”

“We can now understand the inadequate or misleading nature of the category of totalitarianism, which is usually invoked to consecrate the assimilation of Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany. A growing number of historians are questioning or rejecting it. “

“Once we enter the place of production and work, we do not at all get the impression of rigid discipline and blind obedience: on the contrary, there was no shortage of disorder and conflict.”

“In conclusion, visiting a factory or a Soviet shipyard (including during the Stalin years) certainly does not give the impression of entering a “totalitarian” workplace.”

“Arendt’s assertion that “Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West’ against Bolshevism”, but instead “remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West”, is nothing more than tribute to Cold War ideology.”

“Even before the Nazis had come to power, on January 12, 1931, Stalin had described anti-Semitism as a form of “cannibalism.”

“In conclusion: the policy of “terror-famine” attributed to Stalin is deeply rooted throughout the history of the West, it was practiced in the 20th century primarily against the land of the October Revolution, and it saw its triumph after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

“Now let us begin the first act of the tragedy. It takes place in pre-revolutionary Russia, close ally of the Entente during World War I. Discriminated against and oppressed, the Jews were suspected of sympathizing with the German enemy and invader. The General Staff warned against their espionage.”

“Thus we reach the third act. Defeated by the Bolsheviks despite Western assistance, the Whites emigrated to the West, bringing with them the denunciation of the October Revolution as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which irrefutably confirms such a reading.”

“All this is erased at a stroke by the accusation of anti-Semitism directed to the longest-lasting leader of the country that emerged from the October Revolution, labelled too a “Judeo- Bolshevik plot.”

“The accusation of anti-Semitism directed at Stalin is made even more exceptional by the fact that it appears devoted to denouncing this scourge along virtually his entire arc of evolution.”

“His conclusion was clear: “The only way to eradicate pogroms is to abolish the tsarist autocracy.”

“He [Hitler]would repeat this thesis some time later during a dinner conversation: “Behind Stalin are the Jews.”

“A clear line of continuity arose with the Nazi reading of communism as Judeo-Bolshevik subversion and conspiracy: the enemies continued to be the communists, Soviets, and Jews who “are lower than animals”.

“If we continued this ad absurdum, Stalin should be charged with a kind of “anti-Semitism”, this being anti-Arab “anti-Semitism”.

“It is quite difficult to sustain the thesis of the anti-Semitism of Stalin and the Soviet Union by using statistical data and empirical research!”

“In addition, suspicion of doctors seem to be a recurring motif in Russian history: an Israeli historian of Russian origin blames the death of Tsar Alexander III on the German doctors who had cared for him.”

“In the absence of further arguments for to the thesis of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, there is his condemnation of “cosmopolitanism”: who were the cosmopolitans if not the Jews? In fact, the accusation of cosmopolitanism should be placed within a quite heavy debate between the two sides.”

“Those being attacked reacted to their accusers by defining them as abstract cosmopolitans and incapable of actually building a new social order.”

“Moreover, on the basis of the hermeneutics of suspicion used with Stalin, Trotsky cannot escape the accusation of anti-Semitism either.

“The leading role played by the Jews was not limited to the overthrow of the old regime in Russia. The Jewish historian continues: to the “omnipresent Jewish minority” Lenin assigned the role of “guardians of communism”.

“The thesis of Stalin’s anti-Semitism is revealed to be untenable in light of historical and conceptual reflection.”

“Given this background, it is understandable that, even before Lenin, Trotsky was “the ideal satanic subject of anti-Bolshevik posters.”

“A manifesto of anti-communist propaganda disseminated during the Russo-Polish war of 1920 portrayed him with not quite human features as seen from above, with the Star of David around his neck, and a mountain of skulls.”

“Unfortunately, Arendt operates on a purely ideological level, without even considering the problem of a comparative analysis of the policy pursued by the leaders of different countries in situations if acute crisis.”

“Overall, reading any history of the Cold War is sufficient to realize that the country born of the October Revolution was particularly exposed to the danger of not only military invasion, but also infiltration and espionage.”

“Later, a second conspiracy theory to explain the October Revolution appeared; besides the Bolsheviks, this time the Germans were not accused but the Jews.”

“On 31 August 1939 Molotov accused France and England of having rejected the Soviet policy of collective security in the hope of pushing the Third Reich against the Soviet Union, without hesitating to provoke “a grand new slaughter, a new holocaust of nations.”

“Lenin continued to maintain a political and moral condemnation of the war, as well as the political and social system that generated it. The moral pathos that inspired the Leninist analysis of capitalism and especially colonialism is evident.“

“Denunciation of the genocidal practices of the West played a central role especially in the portrait sketched by Lenin in Notebooks on Imperialism, which collected material extracted from the liberal- bourgeois literature of the moment.”

“No less full of moral indignation was Stalin’s reading of colonialism.”


“It is true that in the clandestine period the Bolshevik Party and Stalin had led the struggle against autocracy through quite violent methods (robbing banks and armored cars), and this is where the historians who are determined to describe Stalin as a gangster from youth stop.”

“Finally: while the systematic killing of civilians by bombing is a crime in itself, the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization by forced march ended up leading to a series of crimes.”

“Unlike the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization at forced march, the massacre of the Polish officers, decided by the Soviet leadership group and executed in Katyn in March-April 1940, was itself a crime. “

“Although unjustifiable, the crime we are now dealing with does not refer to the peculiar characteristics of the personality of Stalin or of the regime he led.”

“Then there came an increase of violence that cannot be justified by appealing to the state of emergency or the “supreme emergency”. In this sense, moral judgment coincides with political judgment.”

“After winning power, Stalin not only insisted on the need to assimilate of Western technology, but also stated that, if they really wanted to live up to the “foundations of Leninism,” the Bolshevik cadres needed to know how to combine “Russian revolutionary sweep” with “American efficiency.”

“The reference to Peter the Great seems more convincing insofar as, in explaining the history of Soviet Russia, it explicitly referred to Lenin (since May 1918) and especially Stalin, who at times seemed to assume the figure of the great tsar as a model.”

“In the southern United States, where the regime of white supremacy was still in force, a new air was breathed: people looked to the Soviet Union with hope and to Stalin as the “new Lincoln”, a Lincoln who this time would put a real and definitive end to black slavery, oppression, degradation, humiliation, violence, and the lynchings they continued to suffer.”

“We have seen the recognition paid to Stalin at the time by distinguished statesmen, diplomats, and intellectuals. The pages of his thirty years of government, now simply considered monstrous, were read quite differently in the past.”

“Take the example of the Great Terror. Along with the leading political figures previously mentioned who considered the Moscow trials more or less authentic, there was, in 1948, an ardent admirer of Trotsky: Deutscher. According to him, the murder of Kirov had not at all been staged by the regime.”

“Overall, the caricature of Stalin outlined first by Trotsky and then by Khrushchev can no longer enjoy much credit.“

“Arendt’s thesis, which has been dominant in the West without question for so long and has been repeated uncritically again and again, demonstrates the irresistible attraction that, despite everything, is instituted between communist “totalitarianism” and Nazi “totalitarianism...”

“The need for demonization, however it is motivated, is also evident in other fields. Nowadays the black legend of Stalin’s anti-Semitism is still intact. But the diametrically opposite point of view is also present.”

“Finally, it is also worth noting how the theme of Stalin’s “paranoia” is often developed in contradictory ways... Moreover, those who accuse Stalin of paranoia are figures and authors who, without providing any evidence, accuse him of being responsible for the deaths of his closest collaborators, such as Kirov and Zhdanov.”

“In America, too, the Bolsheviks were synonymous with debauchery and moral depravity: they had introduced nationalization of women in Russia...”

“Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks in 1935: “after the demonstrations of brutality and unprecedented ignominy of German ‘culture’ dominated by Hitlerism”, it was time for everyone to take note of how “fragile modern culture is.”

“It is worth noting, however, that the person who criticized this current of thought, which celebrated white Nordic supremacy and defended eugenics, was Antonio Gramsci, the communist theorist and leader especially criticized by Conquest.”

“Finally, finishing the list of revolutions is the one that began in October 1917, urging slaves of the colonies to break their chains, and culminating with the arrival of Stalin’s autocracy.”

“Finally, the ruthless nature of the dictatorship exercised first by Lenin and then by Stalin is not up for discussion.”

“However, theory is never innocent.“

“The least we can say is that the authors of the Communist Manifesto did not benefit from the forced labor that characterizes the Gulag decades after their deaths. Marx and Engels can be accused of having legitimized beforehand the violence that would be carried out in any case after their deaths and decades later.”

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

First thing's first: the copy I've read is NOT an official translation of Domenico Losurdo's original text. Rather, it's an open-source translation of the Spanish version supplemented by translations of the Portugese edition, with some minor grammatical and syntax errors to be expected. This is largely because Verso Books, premier "left-wing" publisher who own the rights to the English translations of Losurdo's work, have time and time again refused to issue this book (in spite of them now publishing three of his other ones). Food for thought, really.

Second thing: this text is NOT a critique. Trotskyists beware: Losurdo did not like you! Nor is it a biography of Stalin's entire life, and gives only partial examination of that life from the post-October Revolution period for his internal worldview.

In writing Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, Losurdo sets out to do the following -- explore a counter-history to the prevailing narrative surrounding Stalin. Namely, it's the narrative that has all the moving parts you might be familiar with; an insane, megalomaniacal leader who acts on whim, the small provincial man with a crude understanding of Marxism, the dictatorial anti-Semite determined to crush the free nations of the world. In order to build a counter-narrative, we are provisioned with a dedicated historiography of the literature (contributing 1,000 footnotes) surrounding Stalin which runs the gamut from Soviet historians, Polish Trotskyists, and vociferous anti-communists like Conquest, nested within quotations from both Stalin and ones on the Soviet leader from contemporaries stretching from 1917 and beyond the date of his death.

To set the scene, Losurdo characterizes the period of 1917-1945 as encompassing a "Second Thirty Year's War" but, rather than being concerned with wars of religion and crusade, it is a war of a communist state besieged from the moment of its creation. The political upheavals in the upper Soviet leadership caste constitute a Second Time of Troubles; the struggle for agricultural collectivization, and Great Terror, constitute a further two civil wars that threw Russia into chaos. Against such a backdrop, Losurdo's efforts are to relativize the image and actions of Stalin (as well as wider Soviet society) as the result of those material circumstances, and also against those of other contemporary states.

In parallel, the internal political struggles between Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin are given a wide breadth of focus, particularly in centering their struggle in what Losurdo terms the dialectic of Saturn. In that Saturnian dialectic, Losurdo highlights the dichotomy between millenarian hope and desires that run into loggerheads with more realistic efforts within a revolutionary to build a society out of the rubble of an old order. Inevitably, this of course leads to the devouring of revolutionaries by the revolutions that they themselves have created, especially situated in times of national emergency. It's easily one of the more interesting ideas that Losurdo explores during the course of this book, and obviously has stuck with me more than I had anticipated.

In large part, Losurdo has managed to craft an effective narrative around those central points, and provided compelling points to chew on. Explorations of totalitarianism and comparisons of Stalin to Hitler are juxtaposed against not just examples that run that narrative aground, but those of the hidden third i.e. the premier Western colonial powers who engaged in the same actions projected onto the Soviet Union. Indeed, Losurdo's portraiture of Stalin is more of a mirror held up to the history of the West, its political structures, and the relations to its anti-communist (and often adjacently fascist) nature in relation to the USSR.

So, with all of that said, would I recommend it?

The short answer is yes: it's an interesting counter-history that centers on Stalin. That's pretty rare in and of itself -- notably the only other counter-histories that I know of are Furr's and Marten's respective works and biography on him. So it's nice to have another one from an academic like Losurdo, even though he caught a lot of shit for this one. (Again, it is curious this is the only book of his that as far as I can tell, has been controversial. We can only speculate why that is.)

Another answer would be this: even if you are not a communist, socialist, or other left-identifying person, exploring the historiography of the literature around Stalin is worthwhile. It's clear that Losurdo put in substantial work with that exploration. You don't have to buy into his central premises of the Second Thirty Years War, the justification for the suspicion and paranoia of a potential fifth column within the Soviet Union, or the examination of the Gulag system, to see how the literature around Stalin has changed from contemporaneous views to modern portraitures of him is fascinating. Lastly, it is worth looking into the window of the pro-Stalinist left which -- though largely extinct in the West -- still holds much sway in Marxism throughout the world, from China, India, Latin America, and Africa.

[Ethan Everhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading, basically across the board. This is not a biography, as I heard it described a few years ago, but an unrelentingly thorough historical analysis of Joseph Stalin, his role in the USSR, and the various criticisms of him that have entered common discourse to the point where people who don't know anything about history know that "Hitler and Stalin" are history's greatest monsters. Losurdo looks at how this came to be and deconstructs anti-communist narratives using sources that even the most ardent anti-communist can't deny are valid (capitalist historians, Stalin's enemies, etc). It's an incredible piece of scholarship that, by the end, demonstrates just how deeply our understanding of historical events and figures have been shaped by the specific ideology of capitalist power.

[Haveaboavida · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book about Stalin, but a contextualization of Stalin. It is also a very good one at that. The main flaw here is that it exposes Stalin more as a statesman than as a revolutionary, but it also presents interesting criticisms on the Soviet Union from a different angle.

[Simon Mee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The radical contrast between the different images of Stalin should push the historian not to absolutize one of them, but to problematize all of them.

You might have heard of this guy named Stalin. You might have even heard that he was bad.

Losurdo would like you to know that is unfair, problematic even. What you really need to do is to engage in some comparative analysis and look at the context of the times. You have to assess what Stalin was trying to achieve in the face of enemies internal (Trotskyites, over and over and over) and external (also Trotskyites and everyone to the right of Chairman Mao). Losurdo would like you to concede that all those factors played a part in Stalin doing the things he did, some of which you should reconsider as good things actually, or at least not entirely bad.

It is not realistic to set out in detail the extent to which Losurdo substantiates his assertions about Stalin being the victim of a hatchet job. An oft-made compliment of Black Legend is how many citations it has. And my oft-made response is that you should immediately ignore anything else that person says. There’s just too much historiographical junk to work through in this book.

While this is a harsh conclusion, I do want to give Black Legend a half hearted pat on the back. Losurdo has a couple of tricks that are worth setting out.

Setting the Terms of the Debate

In conclusion, in Soviet Russia, terror emerged in the period of time from the First World War, which opened the Second Time of Troubles, and the Second World War, which threatened to inflict upon the country and the nation as a whole an even more colossal catastrophe: the destruction and enslavement explicitly enunciated in Mein Kampf.

Organising the book by a simple chronology or by a category by category review of the alleged crimes would have the uncomfortable issue of having to detail matters unflattering to Stalin. So Losurdo arranges the book by loosely chronological themes, such as why the state never faded away, or why Stalin had pay differentials. Perhaps due to Losurdo’s philosophical background, there are complicated discussions around causes of events, such as why Stalin engaged in the Great Purge of the Soviet Army, rather than those events itself.

Does Losurdo accurately describe history? No! Black Legend is cherry-picked anecdotes which leads to a choppy narrative. The discussions around whether Stalin should have had foreknowledge of Barbarossa, or whether Stalin’s masterful understanding of deep battle actually required him to lose over 3,000 planes in the first three days of the war, are excruciatingly painful to read. The defence of the Great Purge runs out of supportive literature and concludes with a reverse form of “No true Scotsman” . Generally, just check the sources, including… …ahem… …David Irving, as well as an author who seems to think there really was a problem with so many Jews in the Bolshevik leadership.


However, there’s a certain cleverness to Losurdo’s approach that elevates the book (by one star) over Chris Rufo’s. Losurdo’s emphasis is on providing context and the thematic structure provides the framework that “justifies” Stalin’s actions, and while not accurate, it’s not totally baseless either. Losurdo’s approach sets the terms of the debate by creating a plausible counter-history of Stalin’s regime, hopping from theme to theme. It is a wacky funhouse history where everyone loved being a Stakhanovite when necessary, but could just chill out and quiet quit when not, yet it does drag you in to responding to Losurdo’s points in the order he controls – after all, if you don’t respond directly and instead stick with your parallel “reality”, aren’t you just dodging Losurdo’s arguments?

While not strictly tied to his organising principle, Losurdo also regularly fits in attacks on Khruschev’s Secret Speech, Arendt and Trotsky in ways that probably wouldn’t fit on a straightforward assessment of the evidence. Khruschev and Arendt are valid, if totally archaic targets for the historiography of Stalin and avoids dealing with more contemporary criticism. The prolonged savagings of Trotsky read more like a factional animus, however it does inflate Trotsky into a Manichean opponent to Stalin – if Trotsky is evil, then Stalin must be good… …right?

If everyone jumped off a bridge...

A US commission at the time ascertained that, out of 139 prisoners examined, 137 had “testicles permanently destroyed as a result of the blows they had received.”*

The great thing about making your book about the context in which Stalin operated in is that you get to engage in whatabouterism. To put it less dismissively, if everyone else was acting badly, then how can you single out Stalin? It also throws comparisons between Stalin and Hitler into a new light - are Western imperialist dogs elevating Stalin to the evil of Hitler for political reasons rather than making an honest appraisal of respective crimes?

As a broad comment, Losurdo’s comparisons with Western bad acts (such as India, Australia, America) do suffer due to differences in time/intensity/extensiveness with the Great Terror. Sometimes he inadvertently gives the game away when trying to mess with the figures, such as pretending that the treatment of prisoners in Alabama can be treated as representative whereas the Kolyma goldmines can be excluded.

However, he’s not out of order as a whole. The vicious Korean War era South Korean regime, dependent on significant United States support (extending to occasional connivance in massacring South Korean civilians), is a valid comparison even when misapplied to the Katyn massacre. Another reasonable one is the brutal suppression of Communist supporters in Indonesia, which the Western World saw as a "good thing".

I cannot answer or “rate” those more pertinent comparisons that Losurdo makes. I am neither well read enough to know the answer, nor paid well enough to find out. Despite this, I do have one major issue with Losurdo’s examples that are supposedly meant to provide context, an issue that undercuts my compliment as to the structure of Black Legend: Losurdo does not properly explain what he providing context for. Losurdo does not set out the accusations behind the Holodomor, the Great Purge or the Great Terror. He will occasionally admit that very bad things happened, but not what those bad things were. There is a lot of assumed knowledge on the reader as to what the accusations against Stalin are. I personally see this as obfuscation, an unwillingness to engage with the documented evidence and trade on recency bias in the reader’s mind – if you only read about everyone else’s crimes in Black Legend, the Stalin’s ones become more abstract in your head.

In respect of the gulags, Losurdo does (for completeness) mention some of the claims of Anne Applebaum and Robert Conquest, but the former author he implausibly holds out as admitting the gulags were good (and Losurdo only covers this point up to 1937), and he tries to undermine the later with Douglas Tottle, an author who’s book is classed as Holodomor denial literature by the Library of Congress – one of the many issues that Losurdo fails to mention with his citations.

The issue is then that while I would potentially concede that there may be comparable atrocities to those of Stalin’s Soviet Russia, Losurdo has not provided me with a valid metric to compare, partly because he never sets out what exactly it is he is defending.

In conclusion, far from being an expression of “an excess of irrational and senseless violence,” the bloody terror unleashed by Stalin is in fact the only way in which he succeeded in bending the “resistance of true communist forces.”

My extremely qualified defence of Black Legend is this: It provides a valid approach as how to problematize the portrayals of Stalin as evil. However, you should read it from a very high level as to how you might do it, not as a successful example of it being done.
At this stage, I still think Stalin was a pretty bad dude.

* I note the citation for this statement is a book that cites another book, not any US commission, evidencing Losurdo’s surface level reading of his sources.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuando un libro parte de una premisa tan audaz como la que ya se afirma en el título, las expectativas son altísimas. Y cuando las expectativas son altas, es más habitual que la empresa esté abocada al fracaso.

Aún así, aquí la mediocridad de la obra se manifestaría con otro título, e incluso otro objetivo, porque los problemas son más de metodología que de alcance. Primero lo bueno: Losurdo realiza un trabajo historiográfico impresionante, que confirman 10 páginas de bibliografía y más de un millar de notas al pie. El remitir constantemente a las fuentes puede hacer ligeramente más ardua la lectura, pero aporta un barniz de rigor permanente y muy necesario, que se combina con un estilo bastante claro y asequible para llegar a cualquier lector.

Por otra parte, esa crítica de la "leyenda negra" de Stalin tiene dos grandes aciertos: para empezar, para retratar al personaje acude no solo a sus admiradores, sino también muy a menudo a sus detractores, con lo que se transmite una impresión de objetividad bastante clara que Losurdo, desde una posición que no se compromete con el comunismo (desconozco con qué lo hace, y aunque se agradece la objetividad del observador "neutral", habría sido agradable saberlo para conocer qué fiabilidad darle a algunas afirmaciones y opiniones; no es lo mismo que llame "genio militar" a Stalin un marxista-leninista convencido, que que lo haga un dirigente nazi); para seguir, el repaso de las críticas y mitos de su historia se hace desde la contextualización de la situación del país y la comparación con hechos similares en países nada demonizados en la historiografía, como es el caso de Inglaterra o de los Estados Unidos. Así, mientras leemos sobre las condiciones de vida en un gulag, sobre el teorema de afinidad entre Hitler y Stalin, sobre el Holodomor o sobre la opresión estalinista, también podemos hacerlo sobre la vida de los convictos en Australia y de los afroamericanos en su país, sobre las prácticas eugenésicas de la Inglaterra liberal y California, sobre la responsabilidad genocida de Churchill en Iraq y en Bengala, o sobre la represión de los nacionalismos del imperialismo occidental frente al respeto soviético de los mismos.

Quizá por eso el gran fallo, y lo que hace pasar la obra de un sobresaliente a un aprobado justo, sea el hecho de que Losurdo no se atreve a ir con su investigación y crítica hasta las últimas consecuencias. Y es que esta "crítica de una leyenda negra" no lo es tanto, sino que más bien se convierte en una "explicación de los hechos que narra la leyenda negra". El problema de raíz es que Losurdo no cuestiona en numerosas ocasiones los hechos que se narran en la leyenda negra, y de hecho, afirma en repetidas veces la responsabilidad de Stali en "el horror del gulag y otros crímenes". No se cuestionan apenas, por ejemplo, los hechos que la historiografía cuenta sobre el Holodomor (más allá de intuirse su construcción como mito entre Conquest y el nazismo), no se da el menor espacio a la versión alternativa (y bastante aceptada entre un buen número de historiadores) de la responsabilidad nazi en la masacre de Katyn, no se cuestionan los números de muertes en la Gran Purga ni se habla en profundidad de la responsabilidad de un Yezhov ajeno al control de Stalin, ni tampoco se compara la narrativa sobre los gulags y el número de presos de la Unión Soviética con los datos actuales de presos en EEUU, mayores tanto en porcentaje como en números absolutos.

Así, lo que hace Losurdo no es realmente poner en tela de juicio los hechos que se narran en la leyenda negra, sino simplemente, demasiado a menudo, las explicaciones a esos hechos. Pero si las explicaciones historiográficas "oficiales" no deben ser tomadas como dogma de fe, y pueden quedar en entredicho, ¿por qué no sucede lo mismo con los hechos en sí? Y ojo: poner en duda los hechos que se narran sobre Stalin, para analizar su veracidad, no implica apoyar al dirigente o sus acciones, sino simplemente, realizar el trabajo de investigación que a cualquier historiador se le reclama.

Desde luego, una mayor ambición habría resultado en una complejidad superior de la obra, pero tampoco es que todo lo narrado sea imprescindible. A desmontar el teorema de afinidades de Arendt se dedica más tiempo del necesario, así como a ciertas disgresiones sociopolíticas de Losurdo, o incluso a una conclusión sobre el desmantelamiento de la URSS que, por interesante que resulte, no forma parte de lo que el libro pretende trabajar.

Por ello, la decepción se manifiesta tras una obra que, pretendiendo revolucionar la historiografía sobre uno de los períodos más interesantes del siglo XX, al final se queda en pulir y mordisquear algunas esquinas, sin tampoco atacar el corazón de los hechos. La lectura no deja de ser interesante, de todos modos, porque ofrece una visión de muchos aspectos que se aleja de la habitual, y siempre desde el recurso a otros historiadores y a numerosos protagonistas de la época como fuentes primarias, pero si hubiera abrazado un poco más, en este caso, habría conseguido mucho más.

[Efrén Ayón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sería un error afirmar que hay mucha desinformación respecto a Stalin, puesto que como figura histórica crucial del siglo pasado, se conoce prácticamente todo sobre él, con innumerables fuentes primarias de todo lo que hizo, y un registro cuantioso de sus acciones políticas así como de sus consecuencias sociales. La cantidad de trabajo que explora su persona, directa o indirectamente, es casi incuantificable. Información, desde luego, hay.

Lo que también hay en abundancia es un sesgo anti soviético (me pregunto por qué será) que ha moldeado el discurso a su antojo y que incluso ha penetrado hasta en la propia izquierda, resultado de una guerra fría que se luchó en muchos frentes, uno de los principales el ideológico. Serle favorable sería un suicidio, dadas las circunstancias. Losurdo se dedica a analizar con una virtuosidad envidiable algunas de estás re-escrituras históricas para aproximarse a una verdad más objetiva, menos manchada por la política dominante en occidente propia del intelectual financiado por la burguesía.

Y uso el término "objetivo" de manera deliberada, no solo porque presente una clase de réplica a la visión generalizada, algo en sí mismo encomiable, una clase de defensa al comunismo como visión política válida y una justificación de lo que se hizo en su nombre, un adalid de la clase obrera y su proyecto consumado en el marxismo y su realización primaria, la Unión Soviética, sino porque usa muchas de las propias fuentes y documentos de investigación de la derecha para fundamentar lo que dice, hace de sus recursos los suyos propios, contextualizándolos, sacando conclusiones nuevas, revisitando la tortuosa historia del liberalismo a la par. Por citar, cita varias veces hasta el horrendo 'libro negro del comunismo', pero toma lo poco rescatable, mostrando como incluso los más parciales y anticientíficos folletos de propaganda son útiles cuando se extrae de ellos lo que no está podrido.

No puedo recomendar este libro lo suficiente. No es una defensa a Stalin, es una explicación de como lo que hizo (o en lo que participó) puede tener explicaciones más razonables que lo que los ignorantes berreos de sus más fervientes opositores, los cuales lo condenarían al paredón por el puro pecado intolerable de ser de izquierda, repiten como posesos.

Losurdo argumenta que la amenaza constante del exterior para derrocar un estado cuya mera existencia era un problema mayor, así como de las fricciones internas dentro del partido cuyos más fervientes críticos querían sabotear a toda costa poniendo el proyecto de la nación obrera a la deriva del imperialismo, llevan al gobierno que encabezaba Stalin a adoptar una defensa férrea e, incluso, autoritaria, un estado de excepción permanente que fue lo único que se interpuso entre el exterminio total y la eventual bonanza del pueblo soviético. Estas motivaciones no fueron en lo absoluto infundadas, no fueron ataques de paranoia de un líder delirante, fueron hechos. Sin embargo, una situación tan evidente es a menudo esquivada por el status quo, que se limita a escupir barbaridades para perpetuar su régimen explotador.

Pero insisto, puedes leer este libro y aún así estar en contra de lo que representó Stalin, opinar que x medida fue excesiva, y está bien, puede ser una crítica desde la izquierda, centrándose en las personas necesitadas que perecieron. Claro que yo diría que si no estás dispuesto a ninguna concesión, a ningún sacrificio para defender lo que se consiguió con sudor y sangre, lo que tú quieres no es un socialismo que realísticamente se pueda conseguir, lo que tú quieres son mártires bonachones que se lleven consigo a la tumba el bienestar de todos, como Allende... pero eso va más allá del punto que Losurdo trata de hacer.

Son esos matices lo importante, cómo la derecha ignora catástrofes semejantes o incluso peores (hambrunas y matanzas en la India, campos de concentración en Australia, exterminio sistemático de los negros en el sur estadounidense, 'purgas' de los descendientes de japoneses por FDR, abuso de poder por los aliados en Alemania y Japón, intentos de Churchill por mantener la supremacía blanca, y un largo, larguísimo etcétera), tapándose los ojos porque en realidad su intención es simple: demonizar a Stalin como campeón de una ideología que representa el fin de sus privilegios, auspiciar al comunismo al olvido, al pasado, a la inviabilidad de lo que solo trae tragedias... Pero ni lo consiguieron ni lo conseguirán. Un fantasma recorre Europa, después de todo.

LEAN ESTO, LUEGO LÉANLO OTRA VEZ Y FINALMENTE TÉNGANLO SIEMPRE COMO TEXTO DE REFERENCIA.

[authorial · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am psyched to read an anti-revisionist.

[Elías Pensado · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro fantástico para ejercitar el ojo crítico y limpiar las toneladas de basura que el liberalismo triunfante lleva décadas arrojando sobre la tumba de Iósif Stalin.

[Jacques le fataliste et son maître · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stalin gemello di Hitler? Il comunismo analogo al nazismo? Losurdo indaga modalità e strategie di questa duplice identificazione, costruita pezzo per pezzo nel corso dei decenni. Le interpretazioni che l’autore stigmatizza si caratterizzano per alcuni elementi:
• l’assenza di prospettiva storica: «nei tre decenni di storia della Russia sovietica diretta da Stalin l’aspetto principale non è costituito dallo sfociare della dittatura di partito nell’autocrazia, bensì dai ripetuti tentativi di passare dallo stato d’eccezione ad una condizione di relativa normalità, tentativi che falliscono per ragioni sia interne (l’utopia astratta e il messianismo che impediscono di riconoscersi nei risultati conseguiti) sia internazionali (la permanente minaccia che pesa sul paese scaturito dalla Rivoluzione d’ottobre) ovvero per l’intreccio delle une e delle altre»;
• una visione parziale dei fenomeni presi in esame: l’elemento che caratterizza l’Unione sovietica di Stalin «è costituito dall’eccezionale mobilitazione ideologica e politica, che […] per un lungo periodo di tempo riesce a fornire un contributo essenziale al funzionamento dell’apparato produttivo ed economico. Sono i decenni in cui si dispiega una dittatura sviluppista [che] è caratterizzata dalla “fede furiosa” di cui si nutrono gruppi sociali ed etnici che si vedono spianata la via per una forte ascesa e che conseguono il riconoscimento sino a quel momento ostinatamente negato. Non ha molto senso assimilare questa tragica e contraddittoria esperienza a una dittatura, quella nazista, che è instaurata in modo esplicito in funzione della guerra, della conquista coloniale e della riaffermazione delle gerarchie razziali»;
• soprattutto la cecità di quegli storici che distolgono lo sguardo dagli orrori del colonialismo e del razzismo praticati dalla liberalissima “razza dei signori” europea e statunitense (che rivendicava solo per sé le libertà e le negava agli schiavi, ai nativi ecc.), e pongono sotto i loro microscopi le storture del sistema comunista, che denunciava e combatteva proprio quegli orrori: «un mondo [quello occidentale] analizzato esclusivamente nel suo spazio sacro e nei suoi periodi di normalità viene contrapposto in modo trionfalistico ad un mondo che, nel mettere in discussione la barriera tra spazio sacro e spazio profano, tra civili e barbari, è costretto ad affrontare un prolungato stato d’eccezione e l’ostilità irriducibile dei custodi dell’esclusivistico spazio sacro». «Condannato alla damnatio memoriae è il movimento storico che più radicalmente di ogni altro ha messo in discussione l’arroganza della “razza dei signori”, la quale ha infuriato per secoli, dalla tradizione coloniale classica sino al tentativo del Terzo Reich di radicalizzarla e di farla valere nel seno stesso dell’Europa».
In conclusione, mi pare che l’autore compia con questa provocatoria e stimolante analisi di Stalin un passo ulteriore nella sua opera di denuncia delle contraddizioni e cecità (dei vizi radicali?) dell’ideologia liberale.

[غفران خالد · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do have some problems with the book, hence the three stars. First, the book's structure leaves much to be desired. I get the book attempts to deconstruct the mythology surrounding Stalin through different approaches, but at times the jumping back and forth through time and the repetition of mention of some events causes confusion and some frustration. Secondly, in my opinion the book defends Stalin a bit too much, even though the author claims that that is not his intention. I'm not sure I agree with all of the author's theses.

However, it is still an important book that I would recommend to anyone interested in Stalin. The author does a commendable job of demonstrating why the prevalent view of Stalin today as a uniquely evil totalitarian genocidal dictator is wrong. Even Losurdo doesn't deny the harsh authoritarianism of the Stalin regime, or of the horrors of policies like collectivization. What Losurdo does is provide a historical context to the Stalin era, to help us better understand the social, economic and political environment which influenced Stalin to do what he did. Losurdo's problem is with history read as the history of great men and their decisions. Instead, he stresses (and I agree), that history must be read as a sequence of the social, political and economic processes within which those great men made their decisions. This approach helps us better understand Stalin and his policies, which allows to move past the simplistic tropes that have been constructed about him, devoid of context and nuance.

A second approach the book takes is relativizing the harsh policies of Stalin by pointing to similar policies taken by democratic leaders in the West. This might seem like whataboutism, but it must be kept in mind that the author is deconstructing Stalin's image as a uniquely evil figure in history. One doesn't have to deny what he did to dispute that image as, demonstrated by Losurdo, the championed leaders in Western history were easily just as bad if not in some cases even worse. Within this approach, Losurdo also deconstructs the common narrative that equates Hitler and Stalin as twin evils, by showing the vast differences between their ideologies and their policies and demonstrating that a historical reading of the development of Nazi ideology actually places Hitler firmly as a successor of the Western colonial tradition.

All in all, the book is very informative. Made more so by the fact that the author attempts to keep conclusions to the minimal and instead allows the readers to form their own, after following the author's deconstruction.

[Pelayo Casanova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imprescindible, un trabajo historiográfico muy riguroso con dos objetivos muy claros:
El primero darle un contexto justo a las acciones de Stalin y racionalizarlas dentro del mismo, ya que, mejores o peores, respondían a unas necesidades muy particulares con la agitación social generada por la oposición y el deseo del mundo occidental de que la URSS fracasase.

El segundo consiste en desmontar esa leyenda negra que siempre lastró la imagen internacional de los bolcheviques basada en mentiras y exageraciones ridículas para demonizar un país que traía el posible peligro de cambiar el status-quo, para esto, el autor no solo utiliza autores marxistas sino también liberales o nazis, dejando evidente la maquinaria propagandística y la cantidad de falsedades existentes en la historiografía occidental primero contra la URSS y posteriormente contra China.
No solo desmonta muchos mitos historiográficos sino que también compara situaciones tratadas en el canon occidental como grandes maldades o crímenes soviéticos con otros perpetrados por las potencias occidentales, que menos conocidos están mucho más demostrados y son mucho peores (El Holodomor frente a la hambruna en Bengala personalmente autorizada por Winston Churchill).
También relevante mencionar el acierto desmontando las absurdas acusaciones a Stalin de antisemita y de ser un monstruo similar a Hitler, mito, este último, que sigue de rabiosa actualidad ya que todo rival o enemigo estadounidense ha sido calificado como Hitler o Stalin (vienen a la mente Milosevic, Sadam, Gadafi y en estos momentos Putin).

En resumen, libro que debería leerse cualquiera con un mínimo interés en el comunismo y aunque no lo vayan a hacer, a muchos liberales podría abrirles un poco los ojos y dejar de caer en la estúpida dicotomía de democracia bien, comunismo mal.

[Chet · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other positive reviews here explain why this book is a must read, so I'll try not to be redundant...

As far as Western scholarship goes, this blows everything else away. Losurdo always digs deep into primary sources like nobody else. His analysis of Goebbels diary entries discussing Stalin vs.Trotsky flips a lot of inter-war and WWII history on its head.

As I'm prone to point out nowadays though, in China scholarship on Stalin has moved beyond this point, and it's unfortunate Losurdo had to spend so much bulk of the book shutting down Cold Warrior scholars who are taken far too seriously in the Western context (esp Robert Conquest). The recent Chinese Marxist scholarship I've read doesn't even find Conquest and his ilk worth the time.

Would highly recommend "New Research on Stalin's Socialism Thought: A Historical and Realistic Analysis" by Gu Hailiang from Canut International Publishers as supplemental reading to this text.

[Ramzey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book debunking many myths about Stalin.
It took me a long time to find the english version of the book to buy.
To those interested can buy it from here,

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/domen...

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

“… the usual comparison of the communist movement on one side, and the liberal West on the other, makes abstraction, regarding the latter, of the fate reserved to the colonial peoples or people of colonial origin, and the measures approved in situations of more or less acute crisis. The comparison of the two heterogeneous set of measures ends up being Manichaean: one world exclusively analyzed by its sacred spaces and its periods of normality is triumphantly counterposed to a world that, having challenged the barrier that separates the sacred space from the profane space, the civilized and the barbarians, is forced to confront a prolonged state of emergency and the irreducible hostility from the guardians of that exclusive sacred space.”

Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend is a masterpiece of historical analysis. I made use of the late David Ferreira's beautiful English translation (available here: https://jonkennedy.net/vague/stalin-b...) as the text is not yet commercially available in English.

From start to finish, Losurdo demonstrates the extent to which the historical view of Stalin is so thoroughly enmeshed in Cold War - and even more disturbingly, Nazi - propaganda, with very little bearing in either the reality on the ground (see the primary source discussions re Gulags, Barbarossa, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet famine of 1932–33 etc.) or the broader global political context. Losurdo notes that we abhor the Soviet use of Gulags - and for good reason on its face - but ignore the Japanese concentration camps in the United States during WWII, the British concentration camps during the Boer Wars, the enforced starvation of millions of Indians during the Bengal Famine of 1943, the British mass deportation of prisoners during the genocidal invasion of Aboriginal Australian lands and so on.

Much of what Losurdo does best in this text is demonstrate how the ideology of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism/Russophobia tend to overwhelm factual analyses of historical events under Stalin. Referencing noted Western scholars such as Applebaum, Conquest and Arendt or the Soviet dissidents who became so admired in the West - such as the virulent antisemite Solzhenitsyn - Losurdo demonstrates time and again how, without existing ideological framing, much of the descriptions of, for example, inmate autonomy or educational programs within the Gulag network, are clearly not comparable to Nazi concentration camps or, as Losurdo notes, even the mass incarceration of black people in the United States. Much of this information is well-analysed elsewhere - Losurdo mentions Vorkuta, the town at the centre of Barenburg's Gulag Town, Company Town for instance - but it is the way in which Losurdo lays out his claims in contraposition to these existing arguments that is unique to this work. In isolation, the assertions regarding the lack of humanity inherent in operations such as the Gulags or the Soviet response to Operation Barbarossa make sense; they were gruelling, regularly unfair and involved much unnecessary suffering. However, in a broader external context of Nazi Germany's crimes, the crimes of British Empire, the atomic mass murder of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians and so on, *plus* the internal pressures undermining the Soviet regime that Losurdo highlights (looking at you, Trotsky and Tukhachevsky), Stalin's actions are not only understandable (though, of course, up for critique) but consistently admirable. Many of the 27,000,000 Soviets who died repelling the Nazi invasion suffered in ways unfathomable to you or I - some of this suffering was the direct result of mistakes by Stalin and his commanders - but that cost genuinely saved the world. 3,000,000 Bengalis died in 1943 despite above-average rainfall. Why? Because rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than a million tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942-43. Churchill - a man whose despicable legacy has never had to bare even the lightest of scrutiny in the West - blamed the Indians for “breeding like rabbits”, asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi remained alive. How can we condemn Stalin's handling of the Soviet famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide (an argument propounded most virulently by the neo-fascist Ukrainian right-wing) when accounting for Churchill's genocidal behaviour in India? This is not even accounting for Stalin’s very public promotion of Ukrainian language and culture in the years leading up to the event (Losurdo notes, for example, that in 1931, 77% of books published in Ukraine were in the Ukrainian language; an historical peak)? Stalin is after all perhaps most famous as an author for his text Marxism and the National Question; a pioneering work in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of culture.

The beauty of the text, therefore, is not that it obfuscates Stalin and the USSR from all responsibility, it simply puts historical developments in their rightful context. On the topic of Stalin's alleged anti-semitism, Losurdo not only debunks the historically unfounded assertions completely, but notes pertinently that, as a result of Stalin's definitive role in the establishment of the Israeli state (and thus al-Nakba), “if, for the purposes of being absurd, Stalin must be accused of 'antisemitism', he should be accused of 'antisemitism' toward Arabs.” On the topic of the Katyn Massacre, Losurdo certainly does not absolve the Soviets of war crimes, but still places it within its historical context; a context that includes the mass murder of German and Japanese civilians during allied bombing raids, the murder of Italian soldiers in Sicily on the orders of General Patton and, perhaps most analogously, the mass murder of Korean civilians by the American forces in 1950. As Losurdo notes “The American and South Korean ‘Katyn’ doesn’t appear to be smaller in scale than the Soviet one, and in addition it shows a greater lack of scruples (for a war carried out thousands of kilometers away by a country whose leaders in Washington couldn’t in any way claim a “supreme emergency”). But here it’s not a question of establishing a hierarchy between the two crimes, both are unjustifiable; it’s instead a question of noting the inadequacy of the moral-Manichaean approach to understanding Stalin and the country led by him.” No obfuscation, only clear-minded historical analysis.

Broadly, Losurdo demonstrates how the decontextualisation of Soviet policy under Stalin allows for his historical demonisation. If we must condemn the violence of the Soviet state under Stalin, we *must* condemn the commensurate violence of the British and American (amongst other imperial) states throughout the period and beyond. As communists, we must also take heed of the underlying fact that the violent actions of the Western empires were done not in the name of a broader goal of human flourishing - as in the Soviet example - but for the continued proliferation of capitalist profiteering. When the Soviets materially supported the Spanish Republicans in their fight against fascism, the capitalists at IBM, Ford and the like actively supported the capacity-building of the Nazi German state. Whilst the British, Americans and French actively starved the civilian populace in the zones of Germany partitioned by them after the War (Losurdo references After the Reich by MacDonogh on this), “the Germans were much better fed in the Soviet Zone.” The irony of the post-War use of the Marshall Plan to bolster West Germany in comparison to the communist East could not be more apparent.

And it is perhaps this that is most revolutionary about Losurdo's book. Though this line is becoming more visible in the mainstream (see Bevin's The Jakarta Method and Prashad's Washington Bullets), the story of the 20th Century is not, as scholars such as Conquest would have it, a tale of capitalist striving against the evils of fascism and communism (alike and reflected in Hitler and Stalin equally), it is the story of a capitalist West, utterly ruthless in achieving hegemony, spoiling - as in the case of the Marshall Plan - or starving - as in the case of the immediate post-War Allied territories - populations to achieve its dual aims: heighten the extractive capacity of a few whilst destroying the possibility to emancipate the many.

[Maciej · Rating 4 out of 5]

i wonder what was the process of choosing the adressed topics. because id loveeeee a book debunking all main anti-stalin myths and losurdo does that more or less but then theres a significant portion of the book which adresses stalins alleged antisemitism and i just dont see it as As relevant. nevertheless, masterful historiographical work. loved

[Tadici · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there's one book about the Stalin era USSR that is essential reading, then it is this one. An examination and contextualization of the man and his hagiographic depictions while solely using anti-communist or at the very least "anti-stalinist" sources. It's very clear that this work is not apologetic of the Stalin era governance, nor does it try to directly debunk the quoted authors' claims. Losurdo's comparative method and his materialist analysis of history puts Stalin in his proper space in history far away from any Great-Man-Theory nonsense or any other idealist interpretations of this time or any other time for that matter as the last chapter shows.

In addition to being an excellent work itself this book reminds us to be more critical while reading history.

[Josh Northcote-Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an honour to be the first to review the English addition of this wonderful book.
Losurdo reorientates us with respect to the discussions surrounding Stalin and explores how the 'black legend' of Stalin has arisen.
This book does not attempt to whitewash history by justifying the errors of soviet policy under Stalin. Instead, it provides needed recontextualisation with fair comparisons to other states. Additionally, some of the least credible myths about Stalin are dispelled.

The sheer amount of topics covered, evidence presented, and texts cited in 300 odd pages is truly impressive. Losurdo's methodology should be studied and applied to a wider range of historical topics.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A interesting analysis that offers much insight into the mythology that unfortunately shrouds Stalin from view, obfuscating fact from fiction in order (in the modern day) to push American foreign policy goals. It's a very relevant text in that the "Black Legend" Losurdo writes about is still the dominant, hegemonic view of Stalin that goes uncriticised even in leftist spaces. To be clear on what it isn't, however, let me stress that it is not a biography of Stalin nor a particularly insightful book on Soviet history; you'll need at least a loose understanding of both because it puts very little effort into actually explaining either for those unaware (and the structure of the book and way it talks about events doesn't lend itself to beginners).

I'll start briefly with my few critiques, and then go on to what is done well and why the text is really useful. For those that don't want an in-depth review and just want to know whether or not to read it: Iskra Books, the publishers of the official English translation, have laudably released a free pdf that you can access here, and if you just want the key info you can read sections 4 & 5.

The cons. To be honest, I don't think Losurdo's writing style manages to be consistently engaging, and he has a few ticks that I found annoying - such as avoiding referring to other historians by name in text for some reason, instead saying things like "a Canadian historian", "the aforementioned British historian". A baffling choice that makes his historiography needlessly harder to follow while also failing to give much context on why he's selected the historians he uses. Others have praised the book for having an extensive list of references, but similarly I found the way the book references annoying; if you're going to footnote, why not do it with proper citations instead of just the author surname? It's a pet peeve of mine; just let me see which book you're citing on that page! Equally, I just don't think he used enough footnotes frankly, as there were often quotes and ideas that are either ambiguously footnoted or not at all, while others are not fully explained or given a throwaway sentence without even a footnote on where to read more (for example, Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis is a key text that forcefully proves a lot of Losurdo's statements, and is indeed in the bibliography, but there were a few instances where I noticed a footnote to it would be pertinent but was absent). I would have hoped Iskra would have fixed this for him when publishing, given that they have added in a few minor [ed notes] here and there. There was a very minor grammar and printing errors in my edition but that was much less frustrating than the referencing in my experience. The mostly dry writing style was my main other issue, as there's much more engaging works concerned with Russian historiography that I'd sooner recommend, such as Walter Rodney's 'The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World' which covers 1917-1945. I found the dryness is a bigger problem at the start and end, while he manages to maintain a better pace in the middle (another factor in sections 4 & 5 being my recommendation above).

The pros and content. Iskra's decision to publish their authorised edition in 2o23 was based off the dearth of analyses of Stalin's mythos, with even leftist publishes (such as Verso, who hold the rights to Losurdo's books and have published others yet refused to touch this one) not wanting to challenge current dogma. In this, it is a useful text that does something hard to find elsewhere.

Sections 1 & 2 identify Khrushchev and Trotsky respectively as internal originators of Stalin's black legend, each propagating a certain portrayal of Stalin for their own personal and political goals, with Losurdo attempting to unpick the specific circumstances that made caricatures of Stalin possible; the "interweaving of the ideological, political, and military contradictions of the revolutionary process, on the one hand, and the internal conflicts on the other". For those wary of what that unpicking looks like, I should clarify that Losurdo is still critical of Stalin, and fairly clearsighted and damning of failures happening under him, treading a fine line of deconstructing exaggerations while highlighting real tragedies. Section 3 then underscores the necessity of understanding the larger arc of Russian history to properly understand and critique Stalin, and then the rest basically deals with different myths and their historical origins.

To elucidate the general pattern and processes of the book, let's look at a few of the main arguments. One key point that Losurdo argues consistently, and which applies to most of the fabrication and exaggerations about Stalin, is that the terror attributed to him is by no means unique (to him, to Russia, to communism). For example, one can look towards the obsession in the west with Russian gulags. While condemning their scale, their horrors, and the trauma they inflicted, Losurdo highlights the damning silence given to the myriad of similar systems operated historically, contemporaneously, and to this day by so-called liberal democracies. Vitally, we must remember that prison systems reflect the fears, values, and power-structures of the societies that run them. It is for this reason that, rather than standing aloft besides Nazi concentration camps as pinnacles of totalitarian regimes (as is often portrayed by Western media), the soviet concentration camps pale in comparison to the terrors unleashed by Americans and Canadians against indigenous people; by the US against Black Americans; and by British, French, Dutch, and Belgians against colonised people (many of which were completely eradicated, like the Tasmanians by the British) - all of which were direct inspirations for Hitler's white supremacy and genocidal tactics. All of these systems were based on white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, whereas gulags (however brutal in their own respects) never were. Equally, while the gulags emerged from a historical context of genuine and warrented fear about the complete collapse of the state, the West needed no such fears to carry out its own brutality, only profit motive. Nor did the West suddenly learn its lesson, or rinse the blood from its hands, after declaring war on Hitler. America interred Asian Americans in camps during WW2, the British used concentration camps to defeat anti-colonial uprisings in Kenya in the 50s, and the US helped to fund and operate numerous concentration camps in its protectorates and as part of its campaign of anti-communist coups throughout the cold war - and operates Guantanamo Bay to this day while funding Israel so that it can operate the largest open-air prison in history as part of the genocide of the Palestinian people. There is a great and insidious double standard in any argument that condemns the gulags yet has no words to spare for the evil that has underpinned the operating of capitalist democracies throughout history.

Similarly, we may look towards the so called "Holodomor". Where this famine is concerned, it seems liberal academia and the US press care not one iota about historical facts or understanding genuine suffering. To properly understand the famine, it must be understood that it is part of a long tapestry of famine across the region - indeed, the regularity of hunger and famine was a key cause for the popularity of communism and success of the 1917 revolution. Scholars of China will see similarities here; while communism in China managed to take a nation where immense, periodic droughts had been a characteristic of the region for centuries and quickly turn famines into a thing of the past, the CPC are still blamed for early famines that were results of the immense suffering and immiseration they inherited (see The East is Still Red by Carlos Martinez). Also similar to the Chinese case is the way the myth originates from cold war foreign policy goals rather than historians; in this case by Robert Conquest, a propagandist working for the British government to push a politico-cultural disinformation campaign dictated by Reagan. Did Stalin's industrialisation and collectivisation worsen the affects of this famine? Very likely, though the process is much more complicated and deserves detailed historical analyses not insulting simplification. Was it intentional, perhaps to "eliminate the Ukrainian Independence movement", as Wikipedia uncritically claims? Obviously not, and the premise of this is demonstrably laughable. It is curious that even those critical of Stalin dismissed in 1934 that the famine could be in any way intentional, that Italian ambassadors highlighted in internal memos how Stalin was actively advocating for and appealing to Ukrainians, and that even Trotsky (the Ukrainian leader of the anti-Stalin faction, who was engaged in a vociferous propaganda campaign against Stalin and who advocated for Ukrainian independence) never suggests anything resembling the Holodomor myth and in fact locates 1939 as the year Ukraine began to turn against Stalin - a whole six year after the supposed Holodomor. Stalin was himself a key advocate of affirmative action for ethnic minorities and adopted from 1923 the policy of Ukrainianization of culture, schools, press, publishing, party cadre, and state apparatus in order to strengthen Ukraine in the face of Hitler's ambitions to liquidate the Ukrainian people to facilitate German colonialism. As with the gulags, no-one familiar with the history of imperialism will miss the tragic irony that those pushing insulting Holodomor myths (which obfuscate real suffering to push Cold War reductivism) are those that ignore actual terroristic famines both historical and that are still carried out global by the forces of capitalism. While British policy murdered more in India alone from 1880-1920 than the whole history of the USSR, PRC, and Cuba revolution combined, US embargoes have caused more deaths since the end of the cold war than all weapons of mass destruction in history.

Likewise, "in the usual assessments of the German-Soviet pact, the questions [and historical context] that would seem preliminary to its understanding are completely absent" in most discussions. While often seen as evidence of Stalin's willingness to work with Hitler - a handshake between two comparable dictatorships - in actuality "in the race to reach a compromise or an agreement [with Hitler], Stalin arrived decidedly last". Western liberal democracies had already allowed the brutal expansionism of fascism into Europe (into Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania), Africa (into Ethiopia), and Asia (into China), all in an attempt to channel fascistic aggression towards the USSR for their own geopolitical ends - a fact that the US ambassador to France, among others, was very open about. Indeed, at the time of the Munich conference, the USSR had been the "only country to call out the Third Reich and confirm it's support for the government in Prague, putting more than seventy army divisions on a state of alert". It is also worth knowing that in his consistent efforts to create a popular front against Hitler to decry appeasement and further expansionism (which Britain and France rebuffed), Stalin had a lot more to politically risk than anyone else - his internal opposition, and the colonised people of the world that he was trying to work with, all saw Britain as a fascist power that should not be collaborated with even to oppose Hitler, with even Gandhi declaring that "in India we have a Hitlerite government". In this context, how should we understand the pact? Mao Zedong summed it up at the time: "the pact represents a blow to Japan and help to China"; by pausing the aggressive encirclement of Russia, Stalin could greatly increase support for China against Japanese imperialism. The Japanese government agreed with this analysis, and declared Berlin's negotiation of the pact as "treacherous and inexcusable". It is perhaps not surprising that this important element is left out by those who care only about Europe.

I'll stop there, but the book addresses a variety of other ways in which commonly accepted "facts" about Stalin have been conjured up or result from intentionally misunderstanding actual criticisms of Stalin. To criticise Stalin, you could point to the gulags (if properly situated in context), the re-criminalisation of homosexuality, or the support that he gave to Zionism. It would be farcical and insulting to actual victims of genocide to instead point to the "Holodomor" or claim (as Khrushchev tried to) that Stalin was antisemitic.

To sum up, "the erasure of history and above all of colonialism and war is a constant of the mythology committed to transforming all the leaders of the communist and anti-colonial movements into monsters". Once sheared of the historical context, "Stalin's terror appears as the expression of gratuitous violence motivated exclusively by totalitarian ideology or even by the bloody paranoia of a single personality" - an assessment which would not only hinder the proper understanding of actual history, but which also conveniently vanished the historical context in which Stalin's totalitarianism was the result of having to near-singlehandedly (while in a continuous state of internal civil war) opposing a genocidal ideology that was (is) fundamentally shared by both Hitler and the liberal democracies that now try and smear communist movements. Not only does properly engaging with the past fully undermine such an infantile perspective, but it also reveals that Stalin often operated in contradictory ways in often desperate attempts to prevent the implosion of the USSR and defeat of communism on the world stage. In this regard, Stalinism as a label "seems to presuppose a homogenous set of doctrines and behaviour that did not exist", and is in fact a word used as propaganda tool to obfuscate the actual set of rather heterogenous actions and policies of the USSR under Stalin. To acknowledge any of this, to challenge cold war propaganda or point to the historic and ongoing crimes of imperialism, is "not a question of establishing a hierarchy between two crimes that are both unjustifiable, it is instead a question of noting the inadequacy of the moral Manichean approach to understanding Stalin and the country he led".

[Matt Lucente · Rating 4 out of 5]

First and foremost, this is not a biography of Stalin, nor does it seek to valorize him or “rehabilitate” him. This text seeks to contextualize Stalin, deconstruct and put into context the narratives surrounding Stalin, and expose how hegemonic capitalist discourses have warped the average person’s understanding of a complex historical figure into a simplistic, naive, and childish view of a historical epoch which was anything but simple. It was also a very difficult read, and sent my head spinning at times. Regardless, I think it’s worth it for any American (or really anyone in the West) to think about how anti-Communist ideology and bourgeois control of popular discourse has affected their understanding of history and the Soviet Union, insofar as the average American understands anything at all about history or the Soviet Union.

I’m really interested in rhetoric and rhetorical studies, so this was right up my alley. It got me excited to read more Losurdo, as his dialectical analysis was incredibly rigorous, well-researched, and convincing. I thought the overall structure of this text was kind of confusing, and that did hamper my understanding of what Losurdo was getting at at times. However, I would still highly recommend this to anyone interested in actually learning something about Stalin, the historical-material conditions in which he lived, and the conditions which caused the various (and many) changes to his image in the popular consciousness. The common narrative pushed on us in the capitalist west is one of a power-crazed mass-murdering totalitarian dictator; this is, of course, utterly devoid of any serious material analysis.

Losurdo uses a truly impressive amount of primary and secondary sources to push past this narrative, demonstrating how social and political-economic conditions and processes caused Stalin to make the decisions he did and ultimately guided Soviet history in the direction it took during his administration. Losurdo states:

”If we do not want to remain prisoners of the caricatured portrait of Stalin drawn by Trotsky and by Khrushchev, in the course of two different but equally bitter political struggles, we must not lose sight of the fact that the events that began in October 1917 were characterized by three civil wars [...] The entangled and tragic whole of these conflicts dissolved in the depictions drawn in different ways first by Trotsky and then by Khrushchev, who told simple and edifying fables of a monster who by his mere touch turns gold into blood and slime.” (pp. 88-90)

He shows, in this example, how Stalin’s contemporary political rivals ignored and obscured the real-life complexities and events which influenced Stalin’s actions. Similarly, when discussing the forced collectivization of agriculture, Losurdo acknowledges its “horrible social and human costs” (p. 130) while still undertaking a serious analysis of the events, pushing past the dominant view of Stalin as a genocidal maniac who just really wanted to cause mass famine amongst his own people for… I dunno, some reason?? Losurdo says, regarding the material conditions which led to collectivization:

“Stalin, on the other hand, started more realistically from the assumption that stabilization in the capitalist world had taken place: the defense of the USSR was primarily a national task. It was not only a question of promoting the industrialization of the country in forced stages: as the 'grain crisis' showed, the flow of foodstuffs from the countryside to the city and to the army was far from guaranteed. This problem was particularly sensitive to a leader such as Stalin who, on the basis of the rich experience accumulated during the civil war, had repeatedly stressed the primary importance in a future conflict of the stability of the rear and of food supplies from the countryside. Here are the conclusions that emerged from a letter to Lenin and an interview with Pravda in the summer and autumn of 1918 respectively: ‘the food question is naturally bound up with the military question.’ In other words, ‘an army cannot exist for long without a strong rear. For the front to be firm, it is necessary that the army should regularly receive replenishments, munitions and food from the rear.’ Even on the eve of Hitler’s aggression, Stalin was to pay great attention to agriculture, pointing to it as a central element of national defense. It can be understood then why, at the end of the 1920s, the collectivization of agriculture appeared to be an obligatory way to dramatically accelerate the industrialization of the country and to ensure in a stable way the supplies that the cities and the army needed: all in anticipation of the war.” (p. 129)

It was not maniacal mass-murdering impulse that led to collectivization, and the resultant period of famine was neither intentional nor un-addressed by Soviet leadership: it was a decision arrived at due to increasing hostility and aggression by the western capitalist powers towards the USSR, the rise of fascism in western Europe, and the onset of the Great Depression, a global economic crisis caused by those very same capitalist powers.

Throughout the text, Losurdo describes the “interweaving of the ideological, political, and military contradictions of the revolutionary process, on the one hand, and international conflicts on the other” and how those contradictions (and not the arbitrary whims of a power hungry madman) influence the course of Soviet history. This is a useful lesson for Americans who are inundated by very similar rhetoric directed at current figures such as Kim Jong-Un or Xi Jinping, whose countries have been subjected to immense pressure, sanctions, and hostility by the U.S.

I liked that the text is not interested in a simple “defense” of Stalin, as Losurdo acknowledges the harshness of Stalin’s administration, the disaster of collectivization, etc. He also , however, takes the much-appreciated step of bringing the reader’s attention to similar (and often much worse and more intentionally destructive) policies and actions taken by historical figures who are commonly valorized in the West, such as Churchill.

I find it interesting, for example, that the gulags (abolished in 1960) are commonly shown to us as an example of Stalin’s undeniable, unique evil, while the U.S. remains the most incarcerated country (both per capita and by raw numbers) in the entire world. I really liked the sections on “concentrationary universes” overall. Losurdo takes a nuanced and materialist view of the gulags, demonstrating that they were not at all homogenous, took on various iterations from the 1930s until their abolishment, and had "relatively well-off and ‘free’ phases and phases of sharp deterioration” (p. 148), again due in large part to material conditions, not some imaginary murderous will by Stalin and party leadership. To be clear, I am anti-prison as a general principal, and think the gulags were by and large a bad thing and a mistake: however, their early history shows demonstrable, concrete actions and desire to treat imprisoned people (largely political prisoners due to the process of de-kulakization) with dignity, humanity, and living standards which are simply not congruous with America’s mass-incarceral “justice” system—a fact which Losurdo demonstrates later on with systematic statistical analysis of mortality rates in the gulags and prisons in the American south. Tragedies in the gulags were caused not by official party lines or Stalin’s “murderous” will, but by famine outside of the prison walls (such as that caused by Hitler’s invasion) or through "disorganization and often the incompetence or rapacity of the local managers”. Losurdo draws comparison between Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps, and American, British, and Canadian prisons. I’ll pull together a few excellent quotes here which I feel accurately convey what Losurdo is getting at:

“The prison systems reproduce the social relations that give rise to them. In the USSR, inside and outside the Gulag, we basically see at work a developmentalist dictatorship that tried to mobilize and “re-educate” all the forces in order to overcome the age-old backwardness, made all the more urgent by the approach of a war that, according to the explicit declaration of Mein Kampf, was to be one of enslavement and annihilation. In this framework, terror was intertwined with the emancipation of oppressed nationalities, as well as with a strong social mobility and with access to education, culture, and even to positions of responsibility and management for social strata which, up to that moment, had been completely marginalized. The frenzied productivism and pedagogy and the associated social mobility were felt, for better or worse, even within the Gulag. The Nazi concentrationary universe, on the other hand, reflected the racially-based hierarchy that characterized the already existing racial state and the racial empire to be built. In this case, the concrete behavior of individual prisoners played an irrelevant or very marginal role, and therefore the pedagogical concern would have been meaningless. In conclusion, the detainee in the Gulag was a potential 'comrade,' forced to participate in particularly harsh conditions in the productive effort of the entire country, and after 1937 he or she was in any case a potential 'citizen,' even if the line of demarcation from the enemy of the people or the member of a fifth column, which the total war on the horizon or already in progress required to neutralize, had become thin. The detainee in the Nazi Lager was primarily the Untermensch, marked forever by his or her racial designation or degeneration.” (p. 157)

“The ‘Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada’ speaks of ‘death camps,’ of ‘men, women and children’ being ‘deliberately killed,’ of a ‘a system whose aim was to destroy most native people by disease, relocation and outright murder.’ In order to achieve this result, the champions of white supremacy did not hesitate in hurting ‘innocent children’ who were put to death ‘by beatings and torture, and after having been deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other diseases’; others would then undergo forced sterilization. A small ‘collaborating minority’ would manage to survive, but only after renouncing their own language and identity and putting themselves at the service of the butchers. In this case, too, it can be assumed that righteous indignation has contributed to an overloaded characterization. The fact remains that we come across practices that are identical or similar to those in force in the Third Reich and implemented on the basis of an ideology once again similar to that which presided over the construction of Hitler’s racial state.” (p. 158)

“It is worth holding on to one essential point, however. In the U.S. South, Black convicts suffered horrific living and working conditions and died en masse during a period of peace. The state of exception [e.g. warfare] played no role, and also any productivist concern played a marginal or entirely non-existent role. The concentrationary universe of the U.S. South reproduced the racial hierarchy and racial state that characterized that society as a whole. The Black inmate was neither a potential 'comrade' nor a potential 'citizen'; he or she was an Untermensch. The treatment inflicted on him or her by whites was the treatment considered normal in dealing with races alien to authentic civilization. And so again we come across the ideology of the Third Reich. […] it is prominent U.S. historians who have compared the prison system just seen to the 'prison camps of Nazi Germany.' And it is no coincidence that medical experiments in the U.S. were carried out by hiring African Americans as guinea pigs, as in Nazi Germany such experiments were conducted on Untermenschen” (p. 160)

Losurdo deconstructs the widespread Western idea equating Stalin and Hitler as “twin monsters”, demonstrating through actual concrete evidence and scholarship that their policies, actions, and ideologies were hugely different, and that Nazi fascism is in fact a successor and outgrowth of Western capitalist-imperialism and a colonial tradition that had enslaved and slaughtered millions around the world before being inflicted on other Europeans by the Nazis. This section is titled “Erasure of History and Construction of Mythology”, and the title there really says it all. This entire work is about just that: how hegemonic Western ideology and media abstract Stalin—and Soviet history as a whole—from their historical contexts and distort them into an easily-digested, easily-sold narrative of the communists as the “bad guys” and Western capital as the “good guys”.

This is not “great man” history, it is a grounded, disciplined look at the way history really works. This is important because the way Losurdo (and any good Marxist) reads history is diametrically opposed to how we are taught in the U.S.—we are taught to understand history as a sequence of the actions of “great men”, and not as an ongoing process of change that occurs due to the contradictions inherent in any social structure and the material realities acting on individuals and society as a whole. We are not taught to think about or pick apart events with any rigor or principles or respect to concrete material reality; we are simply taught narratives which manufacture consent for continued (and past) capitalist-imperialist atrocities, and obscure the true nature of the system which continues to exploit and immiserate the vast majority of the world population.

I feel like I’m rambling a bit in this review, but overall I’d say this is a really solid text that particularly shines in its dialectical materialist analysis and explanations of how historical context and material conditions affect popular opinion and shape discourses. It was pretty difficult to follow at points, and definitely requires some prior knowledge to really understand what Losurdo is getting at. Overall, pretty good!

[Sebek · Rating 2 out of 5]

My overall impression of the book is very close to that given in the review by غفران خالد. I understand the book's main objective is to demythologize Stalin and contextualize him against the contemporary political landscape. It makes some valid points, it delineates the whole milieu which allowed such ideologies as fascism and nazism to develop and flourish. It also succeeds in showing that Hitler's rise to power was not some sort of an isolated episode that came out of a political vacuum, but that was linked similar supremacist positions of some major Western politicians, such as Churchill and Roosevelt among many others.

My main gripe about the book is that Losurdo downplays major tragedies that happened under Stalin. The author does not deny the atrocities, but rather tries to portray them as lapses in judgement. One example being Holodomor — he argues that it was not an intentionally planned tragedy to decimate Ukrainians, but more of an administrative/management issue on Stalin's part. To back this view, he recalls that Stalin was a very vocal supporter of the Ukrainian cause, who actively promoted their language and culture.
Again, Losurdo's aim may be to contextualize Stalin against his Western counterparts and to prove that: a) he was not a genocidal maniac b) similar tragedies were caused by the British (among other Western powers), which may have been even intentional.
This is all great, but rightly pointing fingers at the West for causing similar tragedies (Bengal famine of 1943), to then dismiss Holodomor as a lapse in Stalin's judgement is terribly problematic, to say the least.
One reason being, that it seems like terrible whataboutism irregardless of Losurdo's intentions — you don't have to convince me that Churchill, Roosevelt et al were disgusting white supremacists, but it still doesn't somehow make causing a famine of that magnitude any more acceptable.
Second reason is that Stalin's professed intentions pale in comparison to death of millions of Ukrainians. To use the same rhetorical device as the author, one can recall multiple examples from the West where professed intentions were also noble, but the effects were not. Take Al-Shifa factory bombing ordered by Clinton for one — to give some quick background, it was a pharmaceutical factory responsible for supplying 50% of Sudanese medications; the reason that was given as the grounds for bombing (although many consider this a mere pretext) was suspicion of chemical weapons being produced at the site (they were not).
When it comes to Katyn massacre ordered by Stalin's Politburo and blamed on Nazis, it gets even worse. Losurdo devotes only a couple of pages and gives some half-assed explanation I can't even completely remember — again, he acknowledges it happened, but of course with some kind of a disclaimer. It might cause cognitive dissonance to some to learn that among 22.000 murdered — apart from Poles — there were also Ukrainians and Jews, after having read the line of arguments Losurdo launched to prove how emancipated Jews and Ukrainians were in the USSR under Stalin's rule.

Even though Losurdo makes some valid points and provides a lot of necessary context omitted by some other historians, there is a pervading feeling of arguing in bad faith at times, especially if you delve a bit deeper into the topics he discusses.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandatory reading, regardless of your ideological leanings. Losurdo systematically dismantles the widely propagated and dogmatically accepted Western post-war portrait of Stalin with an incisive and meticulous methodology, neglecting to let any popular criticism go unchallenged whilst still simultaneously refusing to make any kind of feeble apology for the crimes and tragedies that did occur.

Most Westerners will condemn Stalin without a second thought when the name is brought up, but any person who has accepted this dogma more than likely has no knowledge, much less understanding of pre-Soviet Russian history or the social and political climate that raged in the Soviet Union during Stalin's tenure. This aspect of Stalin's place in history is what Losurdo seeks to accentuate most, and in doing so it becomes particularly difficult to retreat back to popular criticisms of the Soviet leader.

The level of severity in this dismantling of the Stalin myth and the egregiousness of the fabrications shown to be surrounding Stalin as well as several other historical figures that are briefly treated is something that, given Losurdo's venerable intellectual integrity and erudite contextualization, will forever alter your view of history and how it is weaponized by the ruling class.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading this great work of comparative history by Losurdo, I was continually reminded of this quote by another one of my personal favorite historians,
W. E.B. Du Bois, about the whole point of the historical discipline:
“If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”

While Losurdo does not omit or trivialize the horrors that took place during the Stalin era of the USSR, he places them within the proper context of the incredibly fraught international situation of the era, and the domestic upheaval and chaos that comes with the collapse of one regime and the attempt to build a new one from scratch.

[Guilherme Goldner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antes de ler eu era 100% Stalin
Agora sou 200%

Um livro esclarecedor sobre os mitos liberais criados sobre a figura de Stalin, em que utiliza comparações com a "democracia" liberal burguesa e com o imperialismo.

O livro se baseia na análise científico-histórica de todos os assuntos que trata assim como a sua contextualização histórica, diferentemente da maioria das obras que o criticam ou tratam Stalin como monstro gêmeo de Hitler.

Recheado de fontes não alinhadas à Stalin e fontes liberais, o livro tem o crédito de não ser uma obra tendenciosa.

É um dos livros mais essenciais nos dias de hoje em que vermes comparam o nazismo com o socialismo/comunismo.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whose brilliant idea was it to forego an index? This is one of the most in-need-of-an-index books I have ever read. Literally anyone who sees it on your shelf is going to be like “so what does he say about X (black legend about Stalin)” and if you don’t fully remember, it’ll take you an awkward 5 minutes to flip through and find the relevant section.

[cheer · Rating 5 out of 5]

below are my rushed out, poorly written thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless:

losurdo is a brilliant writer. his arguments are well laid out — i can't stress enough how nice it is to read the work of a dialectical materialist. he identifies processes and contexts and does not just pull historical facts out of thin air in abstract.

throughout the book, he does the thing marx does in capital where his citations are largely made up of bourgeois historians in order to use their own work to prove his points. it's so good.

losurdo does assume that you have a lot of background historical knowledge and only fills you in sometimes, and he also does the hegelian thing where he uses terms like "abstract universalism" and expects you to understand them.

this is not so much a defense of stalin so to speak but a recontextualization of him — a project of situating him and his actions in their historical context. losurdo's main point here is that contemporary views of "stalinist" era of the soviet union are completely detached from the actual processes and events of history. he focuses on dispelling the myth of stalin as a figure equal to or worse than hitler and exposes all of the genocidal crimes of the western capitalist powers along the way.

and to be clear, losurdo never denies that there was famine or terror or autocracy. he regards stalin as an autocrat, but argues that there are degrees of responsibility for these things. he even expresses that theory isn't innocent by saying that marx and engels actually do hold some blame for the terror unleashed by stalin, but then, of course, explains how the works of locke, j.s. mill, and all the other big capitalist philosophers could similarly be framed as supporting considerably worse crimes not only after their deaths, but *during their lifetimes*.

it's all very compelling, much more so than i anticipated. this book had a similar effect on me as the jakarta method, in that it helped me better understand the processes that produced the modern world by really illuminating just how evil capitalism is.

[Mykolas Yamakaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very accessible history. the critiques felt very fair and balanced and well situated in the historical and national/international contexts. i wish it had been a little more detailed at times but would highly recommend

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely fascinating book that breaks through much of the Cold War and Iron Curtain historiography of Stalin to provide a more nuanced picture. Extremely dense.