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Stalin: Waiting for... the Truth
In October 2017 Stephen Kotkin, professor of history at Princeton University, published Stalin. Waiting for Hitler, 1929 – 1941. In it, Kotkin accuses Soviet leader Joseph Stalin of dozens of terrible crimes and atrocities. The appearance of Kotkin’s scholarship is daunting: 909 pages of text, more than 5200 footnotes, and 47 pages of bibliography in tiny, triple-column type. But Grover Furr has carefully and methodically studied every one of the hundreds of allegations of atrocity, crime, and misdeeds of any kind that Kotkin attributes to Stalin and his closest advisers. Furr has checked every reference, every article and book, that Kotkin cites as evidence. The result: Furr has found that every single "crime" Kotkin alleges is false — a fabrication. Not a single accusation holds up. On the evidence, Stalin committed NO crime, no atrocities — for if he had, Kotkin would surely have uncovered at least one. Furr’s exhaustive research shows that Soviet history of the 1930s, has been falsified. Furr’s book is a model of meticulous examination of evidence and careful, objective analysis and deduction. Stalin. Waiting for … The Truth exposes the lies and falsehoods behind Soviet history of the 1930s with the same meticulous attention to detail as his previous works: Khrushchev Lied (2011), The Murder of Sergei Kirov (2013), Blood Lies (2014), Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015), Yezhov vs. Stalin (2016), Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (2017), and The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence; The Solution (2018).
364 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2019
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About the author
Grover Furr
28 books146 followersGrover Furr (Dr. Grover Carr Furr III) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.
He has researched and published extensive material on Soviet history (with an emphasis on the Stalin period) and on academic Sovietology from a critical perspective, for over four decades. Furr is a critic of anglophone and Western historiography of the USSR and of what he calls "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (a critique to which much of his bibliography attends).
He has researched and published extensive material on Soviet history (with an emphasis on the Stalin period) and on academic Sovietology from a critical perspective, for over four decades. Furr is a critic of anglophone and Western historiography of the USSR and of what he calls "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (a critique to which much of his bibliography attends).
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January 10, 2020
This book, “Waiting For…The Truth” by Grover Furr, examines the book by Stephen Kotkin, “Stalin, Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941”. I might be strange, but this is a fun read. If you thought that the product via a big publishing house on a big subject/big stage of popular historical scholarship from a full professor of history at an Ivy League university would represent any but the highest standards, you might be overcome by this book. Having read Grover Furr before, examining with source analysis a massive amount of published purported scholarship on the history of the Soviet Union, I am already acquainted with what such “scholars” have gotten away with. This book uncovers a new low in the standards they represent. Given Furr’s exposure of the dishonest tricks that Timothy Snyder employed in “Blood Lands”, that’s saying something. Cf my review of “Blood Lands” here in Goodreads and on the back of “Trotsky’s Amalgams”, attributed to someone else (?!)
Furr easily and rapidly disposes of Kotkins repeated and unsupported assertions that Stalin caused the famines of 1931-1932
Here are some brief glimpses into what utter trash the Kotkin book is.
Kotkin blames Stalin for the “Holodomor” famine because he had implemented collectivization and rapid industrialization. But the only cause for which there is evidence is environmental and thus ecological since pathogens and pests and their negative impacts on crop yield are highly affected by both. Neither policy mistakes nor rapid industrialization were as contributory for example as a rust epidemic and insect infestations that reduced grain yield. Kotkin’s concedes that during this critical period there were challenging environmental conditions: drought and torrential rains. This attribution of the famine to any causes other than incompetence and ideological rigidity of Stalin is a new formulation once the earlier claims that the famine was intentionally initiated by Stalin were dropped in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. But there is no discussion of the underlying evidence for causal environmental conditions, perhaps to hide the depth, complexity and thus weight of such evidence because reference is made to it only in footnotes. A responsible telling of this period of Soviet history would at least discuss other views or even the best supported findings on the cause of the famine. And not treat the environmental conditions as mere background to supposed inept to thoroughly incompetent acts by Stalin. A far worse situation, the Irish potato famine, is treated differently in the west, with environmental conditions driving an epidemic of a disease agent while the massive contributing issues of British colonial governance over many years prior to the epidemic and famine and afterwards are left in the background. The Irish famine actually has the proximate cause, the potato disease epidemic and a massive set of ultimate causes embodied by the colonialist system of the Imperial British government.
Other snippets exemplary of how Kotkin treats the complexity of the causes of the 1931-32 famine: Despite being justified based on contemporary observations by many, and findings by other researchers subsequently, Stalin's conclusion that certain groups of peasants refused to work is deemed “monstrous''. Kotkin claims that Stalin was self-deluded due to false reporting by “frightened statisticians” and his own “magical thinking” (neither of these bases for which Stalin deluded himself are supported by any evidence. Everything he did was wrong, according to Kotkin. The Professor fails to mention that the net or the ultimate result of collectivization and other actions Stalin took was the end of centuries-old cycles of famine in Russia.
With other major events during Stalin’s leadership such as the period beginning with the assassination of Kirov by factions allied with the exiled Trotsky, Furr provides much independent evidence that the testimony and findings of the Moscow Trials have not been credibly impeached, however forceful the typical attempts with an air of authoritativeness (big publisher, prominent scholar, big book with a massive amount of footnotes) in doing so made by anti-communist writers. The cardinal, governing rule in this kind of anti-communist writing is rote dismissal of the validity of the Moscow Trial testimonies by which so many were found guilty of crimes against the Soviet Union Such dismissal is based on assumptions (torture, coercion, fabrications by Soviet authorities) with no evidence to back them. Furr confronts this rejection of Soviet evidence by interesting means: examination of evidence contained within the words of the conspirators themselves, a method he employs to great effect in his other books. An example: Even the worst conspirators who were familiar with the system confronting them (such as Bukharin) didn’t refer to to torture or coercion. Bukharin witnessed a face-to-face confrontation between Radek and Piatakov, in which Radek denounced Piatakov as a spy. Bukharin told his wife that Ordzhonikidze was incensed about Piatakov and that Piatakov confessed his guilt to Ordzhonikidze. Bukharin did not tell his wife that he thought Piatakov was lying and so there was not even a presumption of torture or coercion in eliciting trial testimony from such a deeply committed enemy of Stalin and the Soviet system. Furr points out that Kotkin in using Moscow trial testimony in an attempt to prove the Moscow trials were frame-ups, omits portions of the very same testimony that prove guilt, effectively endorsing the validity Moscow trial testimony. Too often, his combined dishonesty and incompetence is so thoroughgoing that in trying to embellish, he soils his reputation even more. For example, he asserts that in causing the famine, Stalin ‘rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable to Japanese expansionism’. LOL, as they say. What could render the WORLD more vulnerable to Japanese Imperial fascist expansionism than the secret treaty signed by WW I allies and the USA that ceded Shandong province to the Japanese Empire after World War I, which jumpstarted or their expansionism, ultimately resulting in multiply more millions of actual deaths than the fictional numbers attributed to communists.
Now for the topology or “internals” of how Kotkin’s “scholarship” is done. See my review of “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr, exposing the quality of “scholarship” in “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder. In the Snyder book, Furr showed how heavy the flux of BS can be from a bigfoot-academic Anglo-American historian can be. Kotkin beats this. Kotkin cited three sources in support of one assertion, when in reality two of the purported sources are two editions of a single source document named differently in the references and the third has no relation to the passage. In yet another case, the three sources given are all the same source cited in three different publications. Unsupported speculation in one work is cited as evidence to support an assertion by Kotkin. Claims of fabrication are utterly unsupported by evidence as are characterization of Stalin's intentions. There is very often nothing in the cited source to support an assertion Kotkin makes. More often assertions by Kotkin are without any evidence at all. ALL of the assertions of Stalin's evilness are unsupported.
The entertainment is how brazen the unsupported the assertions are, even when based on proven fabricators as sources or wholly unsupported by the cited source who have also been shown to be frauds anyway in numerous cases! At one point while reading, as my impression became solidified that Kotkin seemed to be seeking to satisfy the requirements of a focus group of rabid anti-communists, Furr applies "retailing" to the notions Kotkin is pedaling without evidence. One series of reviews I saw had among them those who said Kotkin was soft on Stalin. Tough crowd. Kotkin makes claims of torture without citing any evidence or sources that have nothing about torture or cites a source that makes a claim about torture without citing any evidence. Something is wrong if the baseless characterizations of Stalin are as over-the-top as found in Kotkin's prose. Kotkin's rhetoric is the anti-Stalin paradigm writ large and tedious. Kotkin’s charge that the daughter of a treasonous general was brought to the prison and threatened with rape was devoid of evidence of any kind. The source cited was a 600-page book on the general that had NO mention of the alleged incident. Short passages contain more than one easily disproven falsehood, and the footnotes to such passages are shown to contain falsehoods also! Unsupported claims of torture and/or abuse begin to pile up and crowd upon one after another. None are supported with evidence, despite there sometimes being citations attached to the claims. Sources that contradict the claim are cited to back a claim. Mind-boggling.
A short excerpt from a confession by an NKVD officer who worked under Yezhov the NKVD head who was eventually exposed and executed as the central figure in planned attempts to violently overthrow the Soviet system and Stalin is used by anti-communist historians to impugn the credibility of this key witness who confessed to being a close co- conspirator with Yezhov. This short excerpt is used to try to create the impression that the two were not close. Any less severely abridged excerpts make it clear that the two were joined in conspiracy. Furr treads carefully, calling this kind of thing “omissions", but they are more apparently deliberate given how often similar omissions are committed by the author. Claim after claim of torture are all shown to lack evidence, numerous other claims are supported with citations that say nothing about the claim. Kotkin repeatedly pads the number of supposed supporting citations for a claim he makes by inserting citations that are the same contents appearing in different publications. This even reaches the absurd level of citing the same document published in different places at different times (and thus appearing to be distinct citations) to support a claim, despite it having nothing about the claim. Furr devotes much or most of the-book to exposing falsifications by Kotkin pushing the anti-communist tenet that there was no counter-revolutionary opposition in the USSR working to overthrow the country through violent means in collaboration with Germany and Japan, it was all a ruse by the supremely evil Stalin to commit mass murder. In addition to unsupported claims, padding of and apparent misuse of references, what appear to be sheer fabrications, and other misconduct, there is also old-school misquoting, placing purported evidence out of sequence in the timeline and contradicting his own claims in the body of the text. Furthermore, Kotkin contradicts his own sources, or omits material contradictory to his assertions.
This amazing book essentially relegates the Kotkin book it analyses to the status of no better than a doorstop. I have spotted the Kotkin book on remainder tables in bookstores and it really would make a doorstop, but I would not pay a penny for that doorstop.
Furr easily and rapidly disposes of Kotkins repeated and unsupported assertions that Stalin caused the famines of 1931-1932
Here are some brief glimpses into what utter trash the Kotkin book is.
Kotkin blames Stalin for the “Holodomor” famine because he had implemented collectivization and rapid industrialization. But the only cause for which there is evidence is environmental and thus ecological since pathogens and pests and their negative impacts on crop yield are highly affected by both. Neither policy mistakes nor rapid industrialization were as contributory for example as a rust epidemic and insect infestations that reduced grain yield. Kotkin’s concedes that during this critical period there were challenging environmental conditions: drought and torrential rains. This attribution of the famine to any causes other than incompetence and ideological rigidity of Stalin is a new formulation once the earlier claims that the famine was intentionally initiated by Stalin were dropped in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. But there is no discussion of the underlying evidence for causal environmental conditions, perhaps to hide the depth, complexity and thus weight of such evidence because reference is made to it only in footnotes. A responsible telling of this period of Soviet history would at least discuss other views or even the best supported findings on the cause of the famine. And not treat the environmental conditions as mere background to supposed inept to thoroughly incompetent acts by Stalin. A far worse situation, the Irish potato famine, is treated differently in the west, with environmental conditions driving an epidemic of a disease agent while the massive contributing issues of British colonial governance over many years prior to the epidemic and famine and afterwards are left in the background. The Irish famine actually has the proximate cause, the potato disease epidemic and a massive set of ultimate causes embodied by the colonialist system of the Imperial British government.
Other snippets exemplary of how Kotkin treats the complexity of the causes of the 1931-32 famine: Despite being justified based on contemporary observations by many, and findings by other researchers subsequently, Stalin's conclusion that certain groups of peasants refused to work is deemed “monstrous''. Kotkin claims that Stalin was self-deluded due to false reporting by “frightened statisticians” and his own “magical thinking” (neither of these bases for which Stalin deluded himself are supported by any evidence. Everything he did was wrong, according to Kotkin. The Professor fails to mention that the net or the ultimate result of collectivization and other actions Stalin took was the end of centuries-old cycles of famine in Russia.
With other major events during Stalin’s leadership such as the period beginning with the assassination of Kirov by factions allied with the exiled Trotsky, Furr provides much independent evidence that the testimony and findings of the Moscow Trials have not been credibly impeached, however forceful the typical attempts with an air of authoritativeness (big publisher, prominent scholar, big book with a massive amount of footnotes) in doing so made by anti-communist writers. The cardinal, governing rule in this kind of anti-communist writing is rote dismissal of the validity of the Moscow Trial testimonies by which so many were found guilty of crimes against the Soviet Union Such dismissal is based on assumptions (torture, coercion, fabrications by Soviet authorities) with no evidence to back them. Furr confronts this rejection of Soviet evidence by interesting means: examination of evidence contained within the words of the conspirators themselves, a method he employs to great effect in his other books. An example: Even the worst conspirators who were familiar with the system confronting them (such as Bukharin) didn’t refer to to torture or coercion. Bukharin witnessed a face-to-face confrontation between Radek and Piatakov, in which Radek denounced Piatakov as a spy. Bukharin told his wife that Ordzhonikidze was incensed about Piatakov and that Piatakov confessed his guilt to Ordzhonikidze. Bukharin did not tell his wife that he thought Piatakov was lying and so there was not even a presumption of torture or coercion in eliciting trial testimony from such a deeply committed enemy of Stalin and the Soviet system. Furr points out that Kotkin in using Moscow trial testimony in an attempt to prove the Moscow trials were frame-ups, omits portions of the very same testimony that prove guilt, effectively endorsing the validity Moscow trial testimony. Too often, his combined dishonesty and incompetence is so thoroughgoing that in trying to embellish, he soils his reputation even more. For example, he asserts that in causing the famine, Stalin ‘rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable to Japanese expansionism’. LOL, as they say. What could render the WORLD more vulnerable to Japanese Imperial fascist expansionism than the secret treaty signed by WW I allies and the USA that ceded Shandong province to the Japanese Empire after World War I, which jumpstarted or their expansionism, ultimately resulting in multiply more millions of actual deaths than the fictional numbers attributed to communists.
Now for the topology or “internals” of how Kotkin’s “scholarship” is done. See my review of “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr, exposing the quality of “scholarship” in “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder. In the Snyder book, Furr showed how heavy the flux of BS can be from a bigfoot-academic Anglo-American historian can be. Kotkin beats this. Kotkin cited three sources in support of one assertion, when in reality two of the purported sources are two editions of a single source document named differently in the references and the third has no relation to the passage. In yet another case, the three sources given are all the same source cited in three different publications. Unsupported speculation in one work is cited as evidence to support an assertion by Kotkin. Claims of fabrication are utterly unsupported by evidence as are characterization of Stalin's intentions. There is very often nothing in the cited source to support an assertion Kotkin makes. More often assertions by Kotkin are without any evidence at all. ALL of the assertions of Stalin's evilness are unsupported.
The entertainment is how brazen the unsupported the assertions are, even when based on proven fabricators as sources or wholly unsupported by the cited source who have also been shown to be frauds anyway in numerous cases! At one point while reading, as my impression became solidified that Kotkin seemed to be seeking to satisfy the requirements of a focus group of rabid anti-communists, Furr applies "retailing" to the notions Kotkin is pedaling without evidence. One series of reviews I saw had among them those who said Kotkin was soft on Stalin. Tough crowd. Kotkin makes claims of torture without citing any evidence or sources that have nothing about torture or cites a source that makes a claim about torture without citing any evidence. Something is wrong if the baseless characterizations of Stalin are as over-the-top as found in Kotkin's prose. Kotkin's rhetoric is the anti-Stalin paradigm writ large and tedious. Kotkin’s charge that the daughter of a treasonous general was brought to the prison and threatened with rape was devoid of evidence of any kind. The source cited was a 600-page book on the general that had NO mention of the alleged incident. Short passages contain more than one easily disproven falsehood, and the footnotes to such passages are shown to contain falsehoods also! Unsupported claims of torture and/or abuse begin to pile up and crowd upon one after another. None are supported with evidence, despite there sometimes being citations attached to the claims. Sources that contradict the claim are cited to back a claim. Mind-boggling.
A short excerpt from a confession by an NKVD officer who worked under Yezhov the NKVD head who was eventually exposed and executed as the central figure in planned attempts to violently overthrow the Soviet system and Stalin is used by anti-communist historians to impugn the credibility of this key witness who confessed to being a close co- conspirator with Yezhov. This short excerpt is used to try to create the impression that the two were not close. Any less severely abridged excerpts make it clear that the two were joined in conspiracy. Furr treads carefully, calling this kind of thing “omissions", but they are more apparently deliberate given how often similar omissions are committed by the author. Claim after claim of torture are all shown to lack evidence, numerous other claims are supported with citations that say nothing about the claim. Kotkin repeatedly pads the number of supposed supporting citations for a claim he makes by inserting citations that are the same contents appearing in different publications. This even reaches the absurd level of citing the same document published in different places at different times (and thus appearing to be distinct citations) to support a claim, despite it having nothing about the claim. Furr devotes much or most of the-book to exposing falsifications by Kotkin pushing the anti-communist tenet that there was no counter-revolutionary opposition in the USSR working to overthrow the country through violent means in collaboration with Germany and Japan, it was all a ruse by the supremely evil Stalin to commit mass murder. In addition to unsupported claims, padding of and apparent misuse of references, what appear to be sheer fabrications, and other misconduct, there is also old-school misquoting, placing purported evidence out of sequence in the timeline and contradicting his own claims in the body of the text. Furthermore, Kotkin contradicts his own sources, or omits material contradictory to his assertions.
This amazing book essentially relegates the Kotkin book it analyses to the status of no better than a doorstop. I have spotted the Kotkin book on remainder tables in bookstores and it really would make a doorstop, but I would not pay a penny for that doorstop.
June 29, 2019
tankie grandpa strikes again. you'd think kotkin would really check his sources before printing them!
August 20, 2020
Look, I don’t like Kotkin and I think he’s both reductionist and dishonest in his analysis of the soviet system; however, this book is just a pile of shit filled with secondary sources to “debunk” him. I’m all for defending the USSR’s achievements and saying that it’s better than the US, but posthaste lying about it and prevaricating that everything was how it was in Soviet propaganda won’t help you elevate Marxism-Leninism’s status to capitalist apologists - it will tarnish it.
November 4, 2025
Grover Furr’s work is a revelation for those of us who believe in putting in work and uncovering truths never meant to be found.
December 20, 2024
Grover Furr's book, "Stalin, Waiting for....the Truth", is an exceptional work of investigation. In it, he checks the principal fact-claims made by Stephen Kotkin in his Stalin: Volume 2 book. Kotkin's book is 1154 pages long with 160 pages of triple columned footnotes, etc. In running down Kotkin's footnotes, Furr discovered that they are chock full of inaccuracies, misdirection, logical fallacies, and outright lies. In many cases, Kotkin's footnotes lead to nothing at all, or he gives a footnote and creates an entirely different narrative from whole cloth for his text. Furr checked to see what of the notes were primary and what were secondary sources and then ran down the secondary sources to see what they were based upon. What he shows is that Kotkin's fact-claims as to crimes committed by Stalin are false; not partially false, but in their entirety. So much so that Kotkin's book should be reclassified to the fiction section. As has been noted by others, the book is dry. But the information presented is so important that it should be read by anyone genuinely interested in Soviet history of the Stalin era.
May 27, 2023
Este libro sigue la línea habitual de los trabajos del profesor Furr, un ingente caudal de fuentes expuestas de forma brillante, sorprendiendo siempre la capacidad de rastreo en lugares recónditos de fuentes primarias y fiables. En este caso se trata de rebatir la investigación del académico Kotkin, que va descubriendo sus pobres métodos de investigación y su nulo conocimiento de los hechos que relata.
Grover Furr se aleja del fanatismo ideológico para poner luz en un tema tan controversial y oscuro como la figura histórica de Yosef Stalin. Pero este libro, a parte de aportar un sin fin de datos consultables y contrastables, tiene un gran valor, a mi parecer, en lo referente a lo que el autor expone como "paradigma Anti-Stalin" (que nos llevaría al paralelo paradigma anti-comunista instalado en occidente desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial) y las reflexiones que el autor hace sobre la objetividad. Con el fin de exponer cual es la visión de Grover Furr al respecto reproduzco la siguiente cita contenida en la página 296:
"En su práctica histórica el historiador debe observar los principios de la investigación objetiva desde el principio. Si el historiador no comienza con la determinación de encontrar la verdad 'sin importar de quien sea el buey corneado'; si no permanece vigilante listo en todo momento para descubrir una verdad que le desilusione, su investigación está condenada. Nunca se topará con la verdad por accidente en el camino."
Libro muy recomendado para todo aquel que busque una visión diferente de la historia soviética, y sobe todo para las personas de mente inquieta que buscan la verdad sin tapujos ni prejuicios.
Grover Furr se aleja del fanatismo ideológico para poner luz en un tema tan controversial y oscuro como la figura histórica de Yosef Stalin. Pero este libro, a parte de aportar un sin fin de datos consultables y contrastables, tiene un gran valor, a mi parecer, en lo referente a lo que el autor expone como "paradigma Anti-Stalin" (que nos llevaría al paralelo paradigma anti-comunista instalado en occidente desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial) y las reflexiones que el autor hace sobre la objetividad. Con el fin de exponer cual es la visión de Grover Furr al respecto reproduzco la siguiente cita contenida en la página 296:
"En su práctica histórica el historiador debe observar los principios de la investigación objetiva desde el principio. Si el historiador no comienza con la determinación de encontrar la verdad 'sin importar de quien sea el buey corneado'; si no permanece vigilante listo en todo momento para descubrir una verdad que le desilusione, su investigación está condenada. Nunca se topará con la verdad por accidente en el camino."
Libro muy recomendado para todo aquel que busque una visión diferente de la historia soviética, y sobe todo para las personas de mente inquieta que buscan la verdad sin tapujos ni prejuicios.
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