Book review of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False, by Grover Furr
Since the days of Karl Marx, capitalists everywhere have tried to convince the global working class that communism is our enemy. For those who refuse to swallow that fiction, they tell us it’s impossible — because human nature is inherently selfish.
But the capitalists are holding a mirror and seeing their own hideous reflection. It is capitalism, the competitive drive for maximum profit, that turns (some) people into selfish exploiters. It is capitalism that violates everyone’s rights except for an elite few.
The cornerstone of anticommunism has long been the carefully constructed and widely believed myth that Joseph Stalin — leader of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years, until his death in 1953 — was a tyrant, a dictator, an anti-Semite, a mass murderer. In short, a monster. Countless historians and other writers presume that such a generally held proposition must be true. Any writers who question it jeopardize their reputations, jobs, promotions, publication outlets and sometimes their very safety. Such is the power of a paradigm that stands between the security of the capitalist class and its overthrow.
Fighting Anticommunist Lies
Grover Furr, a professor of Medieval English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, has overcome these all-consuming fears to write his third book on Stalin. Amid the rubble of anticommunist falsehoods, Furr is a prolific truth-teller. In Blood Lies he rips to shreds another book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian. Snyder’s book was published not by a university press but by the commercial Random House, which has promoted it for a wider audience. Its author is a shameless liar who hides his extreme anticommunist bias behind a glossy academic reputation. That bias leads to consistent distortion, always against the Soviet leadership.
Over more than 400 pages, Snyder tries to show that Stalin was only slightly less evil than Hitler, and that both collaborated to murder tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and Soviet citizens. Snyder’s sources are heavily weighted toward fascist Eastern European and Russian writers who are themselves extreme anticommunists and anti-Semites. In general, like the present rulers of Ukraine, they are the descendants and admirers of Nazi collaborators during World War II.
Furr began his exploration of Bloodlands by assuming that at least some of it might be true. But he ended up discovering, and proving, that Snyder’s book is pure fiction from beginning to end. In a thorough investigation of Snyder’s sources, he finds that many of them don’t say what Snyder claims they say, or that Snyder has omitted any passages that contradict his anti-Stalin bias. In other cases, the sources themselves are simply wrong. At certain points, as Furr shows, Snyder is an ignoramus; at other points, he makes it clear that Snyder is deliberately lying. Like similar works by other anticommunist authors, Bloodlands, Furr says, is “propaganda with footnotes.”
The ‘Manmade’ Famine Hoax
For example: Snyder contends that the 1932-3 famine, centered in Ukraine but afflicting other parts of the Soviet Union and responsible for several million deaths, was a deliberate plot by the Soviet leadership to bring the peasants to their knees and collectivize agriculture. Furr shows, by relying on three agriculture experts, that famines had occurred in this region every two to four years for the previous thousand years! The famine of 1932-3 was exceptional only because collectivization (and the dispossession of thieving landlords and rich peasants) made it the last famine in the Soviet Union or Russia to this day. Full credit for this monumental rescue must go to the Soviet leadership, including Stalin. But this history is omitted from Snyder’s version and from all other anticommunist propaganda, with or without footnotes.
In reality, for centuries collectivization had been a spontaneous practice by poorer peasants to protect against the vagaries of weather and crop failures. Under the Soviets, collectivization was responsible for the production of enough food for both the cities and the countryside. It underwrote the rapid industrialization that mechanized agriculture, providing yet more food for export. It also produced the tanks, guns and planes that helped destroy the fascist invaders from Germany and Japan, crushing their dream of conquering and enslaving all of Europe and Asia.
A second example: Snyder argues that hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens were systematically murdered in the late 1930s by Stalin and the Soviet leadership. Hundreds of thousands were indeed systematically murdered, but Stalin and the leadership were not the serial killers. The guilty parties, as Furr shows, were the traitorous internal affairs police (NKVD), led by Ezhov and Yagoda. For months they covered their tracks amid numerous other conspiracies that actually did aim to overthrow the Soviet state and assassinate Stalin and his allies. The pair convicted and executed many innocent people as conspirators. Their aim was to create such strong opposition to the young socialist state and its leaders that the masses would rise up and welcome the German and Japanese invaders. Once their plot was discovered, it was abruptly ended. Ezhov and Yagoda were tried, convicted and executed by the Soviet leadership, including Stalin.
Read This Book
Furr’s three books on the true history of Stalin and the Soviet Union, along with numerous articles and essays, are available on his website, http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/. He has an advantage over most historians in that he reads and writes Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. He uses recently declassified Russian documents about the Soviet era that are inaccessible to most Western writers.
A dense and detailed work, Blood Lies is well worth the effort to read. Along with Furr’s other books, Khrushchev Lied and The Murder of Sergei Kirov, it is a must for those fighting for a revolution for communism. Reading these books and persuading others to do the same could go a long way toward convincing people to join Progressive Labor Party and bringing about a communist world.
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U.S. Imperialist Problem: Too Many Enemies, Too few Friends
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- 16 October 2014 58 hits
U.S. imperialists have a big problem in the Middle East: too many enemies, too few reliable friends.
As the bosses struggle to contain the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, they find their war plans disrupted by a deepening rift with Turkey, on paper a U.S. ally. Looming in the background is the escalating rivalry between the two major imperialist blocs: the U.S. and the European Union on one side, and China and Russia on the other. At stake is the grand prize of the murderous profit system, the vast oil and natural gas reserves of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Only Solution: Communist Revolution
The working class has no stake in any conflicts among these terrorist bosses. Today’s regional wars are financed by workers’ exploitation. The workers that the ruling class needs as cannon fodder are the same black and Latin unemployed youth being killed and imprisoned by the racist injustice system. It’s the same impoverished workers in the Middle East. It’s the workers who stand to be brutalized and exploited in the future, no matter which bloc prevails.
The only side is the one led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, the one that fights to overthrow this hellish capitalist system. We organize against all bosses. We stand for a society run by and for workers, who will share the value they produce. Communism is the one and only road to end mass unemployment, racism, sexism and imperialist war.
Turkish Bosses’ Agenda
As a civil war rages in Syria and ISIS gobbles cities and refineries by the day, a growing split has emerged between the U.S. and Turkey, a linchpin for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The U.S. is fuming at Turkey’s refusal to drive ISIS forces from the Syrian town of Kobani, just over the Turkish border. The imperialists’ concern is not the massacre facing thousands of working-class Kurds. Rather, it’s the Islamic State’s growing threat to U.S. control of super-profitable Iraqi oil, notably in the autonomous northern province of Kurdistan.
Turkish bosses have refused to send ground troops to aid Kurdish forces in Kobani, where Obama’s airstrikes on ISIS have proven inadequate. As of October 14, Turkish rulers had yet to bow to U.S. pressure to use their air bases for joint operations. Most ominously for U.S. war planners, Turkey’s current inaction reveals its unreliability for the broader global conflict to come.
In May, Turkish exporters began shipping huge amounts of crude pumped by ExxonMobil and other oil companies in Kurdistan through the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. At the time, Turkish President Recep Erdogan blessed this deal between his country’s state oil company and Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The arrangement dates to 2012 and the formation of the United States-Kurdistan Business Council, backed by Exxon and headed by General James Jones, the former U.S. National Security Advisor and supreme commander of NATO.
Jones urged “the U.S. government to get behind ExxonMobil and other American oil companies in their quest to partner with the KRG to build an oil sector in northern Iraq” (Iraq Oil Report, 12/26/14). The overarching idea was to consolidate Turkey within a strategic coalition against Russia. But that isn’t an easy sell. Turkey relies on Russia for 58 percent of its natural gas imports (Congressional Research Service).
ISIS’s Rise Threatens Exxon’s Oil
As ISIS’s bloody rise threatens U.S. oil holdings in Kurdistan, Exxon has pulled its employees from the fields, cutting off Turkey’s tanker loadings. With that profit spigot plugged, Erdogan has refocused on smashing the Kurds’ historic goal of a greater, independent Kurdistan in Syria, Iraq and Turkey itself. In addition to halting his army short of Kobani, Erdogan has stopped KRG troops in Iraq from crossing into Turkey to reach the besieged city. On October 14, he undercut a two-year peace process with airstrikes against Kurdish insurgents in southeastern Turkey.
Which side are the Turkish bosses on? Some Turkish energy interests appear to favor ISIS. “A victory for ISIS [in Kobani]...would secure the terror organization’s flow of oil to a lucrative market — its link to the outside world via Turkey” (Oil Price, 10/8/14).
Erdogan sees the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as the main danger. Syria is Iran’s closest ally. Turkey and Iran, nearly equal in population, have long vied for regional dominance in the Middle East. “Turkey says it will only join a military campaign against Islamic State if the coalition also confronts pro-Iranian Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Washington...has made clear it has no intention of widening the campaign to join a war against Assad” (Reuters, 10/13/14).
Meanwhile, ISIS’s advances in Iraq are forcing the hand of U.S. oil interests and their lackeys in Washington. From George H.W. Bush to Obama, four U.S. presidents have used wars and sanctions in a desperate struggle to secure Iraq’s oil wealth. Along the way, they have killed more than three million Iraqis. Now they are seeing profit-hungry ISIS bosses on the verge of seizing Kurdistan. A two-decade U.S. imperialist campaign could be undone in a matter of months.
The Islamic State is closing in on Baghdad, where a rash of bombings on the capital’s outskirts killed more than 50 people on October 11. Even more alarming for U.S. bosses, an Iraqi oil worker was among four people kidnapped by ISIS a few days earlier in Basra (Iraq Oil Report, 10/9/14). Far south of the main war zone, Basra is the heart of Iraq’s richest oil region and operational headquarters for some of the world’s largest fields. Industry insider Oil Price (10/8/14) says of ISIS, “Their fight is not for control of the mosques, but [of] oil fields.”
Forget Obama’s Promises — Generals Champion Ground War
With or without Turkey, U.S. rulers may soon be forced into a third land war in Iraq. Obama’s promises not to field ground troops mean nothing. As General Martin Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, acknowledged, “Mosul will likely be the decisive battle in the ground campaign at some point in the future” (New York Times, 10/13/14). Mosul, held by ISIS since June, is Iraq’s second biggest city. It lies in the north, near key oil tracts and pipelines.
As the war in Iraq and Syria spreads, the U.S. urgently needs Turkey to fall into line. In August, the government’s Congressional Research Service (CRS) warned that U.S. and Turkish rulers “periodically differ regarding how ...third-party actors — Israel, the Assad regime, Iraq’s government, Kurdish groups, Al Qaeda affiliates [ISIS], Palestinian factions, Iran, Russia, and China — should be tolerated, involved, bolstered, or opposed.”
CRS however reminded its Congressional readers of “Turkey’s importance to U.S. interests … as a ‘global swing state’ with the ability to have a sizeable impact on international order….” Like Brazil, India, and Indonesia, Turkey’s value in a potential world war rests on the strength of its armed forces and support for U.S.-style “democracy,” a mix of class oppression and capitalist-run elections. All the more reason, as CRS noted, for U.S. bosses to worry about “a possible deal between Turkey and a Chinese government-owned company to co-produce a Turkish air and missile defense system, which could have implications for U.S.-Turkey defense cooperation and for Turkey’s political and military profile within NATO.”
Workers’ Answer: Class War
While the world’s bosses are powerful, they are not omnipotent. Workers have always rebelled against oppression. From garment workers in Bangladesh to expropriated peasants in China to anti-racists in the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri, they continue to do so today. The capitalists need to put down these workers’ outbreaks while confronting splits in their own ranks and fighting off their imperialist competition. The profit system’s problems are insoluble. Led by a mass revolutionary communist party, the international working class has a great opportunity to organize these rebellions into class war against our capitalist oppressors.
That is the goal of Progressive Labor Party. Join us!
ST. LOUIS, MO, October 13 — “If we don’t get it, shut it down; killer cops, shut it down; Ferguson, shut it Down!” chanted thousands of youth and workers who flocked to St. Louis for a Weekend of Resistance against racist police murders. A multiracial youth contingent from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) once again gained traction with these workers, making over 25 contacts and distributing more than 1,100 CHALLENGEs. WANTED posters of murderer Darren Wilson, the cop who executed Michael Brown, went like hot cakes. 
In addition to leading chants, PL youth went door to door to talk with residents and held a study group with a group of students we met a few hours before about the need for a communist party and revolutionary violence. We marched and evaluated in a constantly changing situation. We learned how to think on our feet under pressure, dealing with cops and anti-communists.
PLP’s actions at the Ferguson October protest reaffirmed the young comrades’ confidence in workers’ potential to lead an international communist revolution.
Communists Come in All Shades
On Friday, October 10, the first march was to the district attorney’s office in Clayton. Killer cop Darren Wilson, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Mayor James Knowles, and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon were the targets of people’s anger. People gladly grabbed our WANTED posters and CHALLENGEs with photos of nationwide fightback against racist cops. Our banner — “Smash Racist Cops with Communist Revolution” — drew wide support. One woman was blown away by our multiracial group. She said, “Communists are white, and you’re mostly not white!”
Our collective was indeed a mix of black and white, migrants and native born, women and men, students and workers. PLP’s very presence sent the multiracial, internationalist message of fightback for all to see. This was no coincidence. PLP organizes in every sector of the working class, because it will take every sector to abolish capitalism.
PLP’s internationalism stems from the communist analysis that racism is the bloody cutting edge of capitalism. It imposes a racist division of workers to produce super-profits, compelling one sector to earn slave wages with the knife nine inches deep, while another sector is stabbed a few inches less. Black, Latin, Asian, and white workers — we all are dying, just at different paces. Capitalism needs racism to survive. Only multiracial fightback can seriously threaten the bosses.
Nighttime Rage
Lost Voices, a Ferguson rebel group that PLP met during our last visit in August, was happy to receive us. They are continuing to lead nightly demonstrations. A number of our chants — including “Black cop, white cop all the same, racist murder is the name of the game!” and “Killer cop, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?” — were angrily taken up at these protests. There are five chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in Missouri, one of which raised $150,000 for racist kkkop Darren Wilson. Whether the KKK is in police uniform or in white robes, they are protected by the capitalist state.
After Ferguson, we visited Shaw, St Louis, where black youth Vonderrit Myers was murdered on October 8 by the racist cops. Here they are also having nightly marches. We arrived at midnight, as over 150 youth formed a circle around Vonderrit’s memorial in a show of solidarity. We linked arms and marched down the dark streets, chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! These racist cops have got to go!”
As we reached the intersection, police in riot gear lined up in front and behind us, penning us in. The cops began beating their batons against the ground to intimidate the crowd as their military armored vehicle appeared on the scene. Protestors stood in front of the vehicle and continued chanting, while others sat in its path. After letting them know we weren’t intimidated, we left on our own accord. The following night, cops arrested 17 protesters at a QuikTrip sit-in.
The main goal of our visit to Ferguson was to share our analysis that racism can only be defeated through multi-racial unity and communism. All the anti-racists in Ferguson are searching for answers. They need an organization that can explain the world situation and has a plan for how to build a new society. That’s PLP. From Ohio and Iowa to Florida and Massachusetts, youth took up our chants, our analysis, and our literature. They are eager to learn more about our Party. We have much to do to mobilize these youth to fight for a communist world. We accept the challenge.
Port-au-Prince, October 10 — When former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, close adviser to the plundering police state of Haiti President Michel Martelly, died October 4 of a heart attack, the working class had only one regret — that he died of natural causes.
Human rights organizations complain that Duvalier, ousted from power in 1986, was never tried or convicted in a court of law. But it is an illusion to believe in “justice” for dictators under capitalism. As journalist Marvel Dandin has noted, there were many reasons that the Duvalier regime was never held accountable for its crimes:
- Successive regimes followed the same trail of corruption and human rights violations;
- The Haitian capitalist oligarchy — basically an organized crime syndicate — never lost its dominance;
- Leaders who followed Duvalier were closely allied to the oligarchy and profited from smuggling and drug trafficking;
- Haiti’s public administration continues to protect racketeers and embezzlers;
- The judicial system is bought and sold by the rich;
- The big imperialist powers rely on corrupt regimes in places like Haiti to guarantee their financial and political interests.
Fascist Father, Fascist Son
Under the rule of Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc,” and his father, “Papa Doc,” workers in Haiti endured nearly three decades of horrific brutality, from 1957 to 1986. The Duvaliers were notorious for crimes against humanity, misappropriation of public funds, illegal arrests, torture, imprisonment, murder, and forced exile of opponents. According to historian Charles Dupuy, “Thousands of opponents were sentenced to prison and exile. At least 50,000 people died in Fort Dimanche prison in Port-au-Prince.” They had the active support of the U.S. and other imperialists because they claimed to be the biggest anti-communists in the region. They are proof that we can speak of real justice only in a communist world. Under capitalism, it’s just bosses and criminals and their war against workers.
Duvalier was chased from Haiti after a decade of crises, including in 1978, ostensibly to deal with an epidemic of Swine Fever, all of Haiti’s native pigs, a mainstay of the rural economy, were killed. They were replaced by expensive U.S. pigs, which very few could afford, intensifying rural poverty.
In 1984, under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) attempted to counter guerrilla movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador with trade perks to right-wing regimes in the region. In fact, the CBI led to widespread hunger and triggered months of mass demonstrations against Jean-Claude Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes, his murderous paramilitary. Under a secret agreement between the governments of the U.S., France and Haiti, Duvalier received a police escort to a U.S. military plane. The second-generation dictator was finally dechouke (uprooted).
Rehabilitating a Mass Murderer
In January 2011, to general surprise, Duvalier was welcomed back to Haiti by Martelly after 25 years of exile and idleness in France, where he led the high life with the untold millions he’d stolen from the Haitian masses.
In the Duvalier tradition, Martelly recently told workers and students in Haiti that he was against communism. Martelly’s lawyer threatened that communists would not be given national or state funerals! But this is nothing new. The bosses attack communism ferociously because they fear it. In workers’ struggles against capitalist exploitation, racism, sexism and wars for profit, communist strategy and ideology are the main threats to the ruling class. Indeed, communists in Progressive Labor Party must challenge attacks by intensifying their work in Haiti. The working class in Haiti has suffered from the lack of communist-led struggle around the world. We must continue to organize students, peasants, and workers, and to build a base for communist revolution.
Martelly’s Turn
Even as the news of one tyrant’s death leaves the masses of Haitians cold, the current tyrant, a notorious criminal, goes on his merry way under the gleaming eyes of the imperialists! Now it’s Martelly who exploits the workers and takes bribes from the U.S. bosses to keep Haiti safe for capitalism. Martelly is known as “Tet Kale” for his bald head. But this Creole phrase also refers to the way pigs are shorn. The working class will not let Martelly and his gang off the hook so easily!
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PL College Club Follows Ferguson Lead! Turn up vs. Racism
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- 16 October 2014 59 hits
TEXAS, September 19 — “Racist administration, shut it down!” chanted 15 students marching through the courtyard of our community college here. Led by PLP, we crossed a major street and blocked traffic. We held this protest immediately after a PL-led panel discussion with students titled “Confronting 21st Century Racism” the racist connection between the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the attacks on immigrant workers at the U.S.-Mexico border. This was our college club’s way of bringing the fightback home, and we did just that!
Panel’s Message: Fight Back Like Ferguson Everywhere!
Building for the panel and the march wasn’t easy. Our campus has cracked down on organizing by requiring any leaflet distributed on campus to be approved first by the administration. As an unofficial campus organization, we organize as clandestinely as possible, even though the police caught and reprimanded one of our comrades for distributing unauthorized literature. Our college town has a long history of anti-immigrant racism and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attacks. Many students responded to our leafleting for the panel with eagerness and relief.
The three-person panel had a multiracial audience of 25 students. It included an English professor who connected the prison construction company GEO and its billions of dollars of contracts for building prisons and its lobbying efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass tougher laws and pass stricter immigration laws to fill these prisons. The second panelist followed up the discussion with his experience as an immigration attorney and elaborated on the recent policy known as Criminal Alien Removal Initiative which allows ICE to become more aggressive in deportations.
The third panelist talked about her experiences in the Ferguson rebellion. She changed the nature of the panel by first asking a few questions to the audience, challenging the capitalist media’s labeling of the fightback in Ferguson a “riot.” After leading the audience in a call-and-response chant she had learned from the rebels of “Ferguson! SHUT IT DOWN!” She gave a powerful and moving account of the multiracial unity and resistance there.
The questions from the audience that followed were evidence of how sharp our panel’s political conclusions had been. A black student in the audience asked, “how do we build a revolution?” We responded that everyone in this room chanting with us was an example of a first step towards building a revolution. The second step is doing something — direct action. At this moment our MC who introduced the panel and another comrade unfurled a banner that read, “students and workers unite and fight against mass incarcerations and mass deportations.”
From Panel Discussion to Antiracist Marches!
We then invited everyone to overcome their fears by joining us in an anti-cop protest. Fifteen of the 25 students at the event joined us, and the black student who had asked the question about revolution was one of the march leaders, and led chants through the campus like “no justice no peace, no racist police!” and “Killer cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
An administrator ran outside and had a tantrum telling us we did not have permission to protest on campus. Without having to explain the revolutionary potential we have as students and workers that super-cedes the need for permission from a petty administrator, we continued chanting. Everyone understood that at this moment our words were our resistance. No one was going to stop us and we continued marching and chanting until some lost their voice. We made 20 contacts from interested passersby. Following the march, we invited everyone to join us the next day at another university. Three committed to the proposal!
The next day at the university, we were a smaller group, but just as loud and powerful. We unfurled our banner and passed out over 300 leaflets. As waves of students passed by and some began taking pictures. Many could not believe we were from the smaller community college nearby. We made five new contacts and were joined by at least two university students.
Overall the two days of fightback taught us a lot about our potential. We are not as weak as we often think and boldness pays! The reality is that our Party’s leadership and discipline turned kkkop and anti-immigrant racist terror into ammunition for the working class. We turned student anger into a school for communism. And building for communism means building an army of workers to challenge the bosses’ power. Black, Latin, Asian and White: to smash racism we must unite. All power to the workers!
