Mohsen Abdelmoumen : You wrote a very interesting book that puts some truths in place: « Stalin: Waiting for… the Truth!“ Why do you think Western propaganda has always called Joseph Stalin an ogre, a dictator and a criminal?
Prof. Grover Furr: Briefly: capitalists naturally hate communism, which aims to dispossess them. During the Stalin period the Soviet Union accomplished amazing, world-shaking things: collectivization of agriculture, which put an end to at least 1000 years of regular, devastating famines every 3-4 years; industrialization; building a modern military; eliminating unemployment; providing free or cheap housing, education, medical care, plus vacations, retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, family allowances. These are just a few of the amazing accomplishments of the USSR during Stalin’s time.
The Soviet Union established and inspired the worldwide communist international, which fought against the colonialism – imperialism of these same capitalist countries; inspired and helped to organize trade union movements all over the world, which reduced the profits of exploiters; and inspired hundreds of millions of working people and others to fight for socialism and communism.
So it’s natural that capitalists hate the communist movement, and that movement was led by Stalin for 25 years. In a real sense, the 20th century was the “Soviet century.” The world communist movement affected virtually every sphere of life all over the world.
Hatred of Stalin by anticommunists is aided and abetted by the Trotskyist movement, which is based on Trotsky’s falsehoods. I’ve written four books about this, documenting Trotsky’s lies to his own followers and to others.
Hatred of Stalin got an enormous boost form Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress on February 25, 1956. Not only anticommunists and Trotskyists, but communists too believed Khrushchev’s accusations against Stalin. We know now that “Khrushchev Lied” – the title of my first book – but we did not have the evidence to prove that he lied until more than a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, when many documents from former Soviet archives had been published.
Anticommunism got another big boost from the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev sponsored anti-Stalin and anticommunist lies on a very large scale, larger even than Khrushchev. It appears that Gorbachev intended to do away with communism as a movement for years before he became the First Secretary of the CPSU and then President of the USSR. That is certainly true of Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was Gorbachev’s right-hand man and who led the anticommunist crusade. Yakovlev bragged about conspiring with a few others to a conspiracy to get rid of communism, after they had read Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.”
Today the avalanche of anticommunist and anti-Stalin falsehoods continues as strongly as ever. It is impossible to get a job teaching Russian or Soviet history unless you are anticommunist and anti-Stalin. This has a big impact on students, the mass media, and culture generally.
Western, especially American, propaganda is constantly telling us about the German-Soviet Pact, while obscuring the great achievements of the Soviet Union and Stalin. Was it not thanks to Stalin and the Soviet Union that Europe was liberated?
Yes, and this is one area where there is some decent research published by mainstream academics. There are a number of scholars who are otherwise very anti-Stalin who defend, with evidence, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, often called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and called by anticommunists the “Hitler-Stalin Pact.”
Didn’t the West, and in particular the United States, which constantly gives us lessons in democracy, arm and finance Adolf Hitler?
Yes, though I have not done research in this area. But there are a number of scholarly studies that have demonstrated that.
Antonio Gramsci said: « The old world is dying, the new world is slow in appearing, and in this darkness monsters arise. » Are the current events in Ukraine not part of a historical continuity with the rise of the neo-Nazis?
After World War II the Ukrainian Nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis, and who had perpetrated the Holocaust against the Jews, murdered countless European and Soviet citizens, and committed genocide against Poles inside occupied Ukraine and Poland, were given sanctuary in the West, especially in West Germany, the UK, Canada, and the USA. They invented the false story of the “Holodomor” or deliberate famine in Ukraine, in order to cover up their pro-Nazi activities.
After the end of the USSR these forces returned to independent Ukraine, where they became very influential in education, culture, and government. They have created a kind of cult around the fascists who led the Ukrainian Nationalist movement before and during WW2. These people and groups are the foundation of the far right in Ukraine today.
The US government supported them for decades. Now the US is reaping the benefits of that support in provoking the current war against Russia. This is more or less the thesis of US professor and expert in International Relations John Mearsheimer. I have been convinced by the evidence he has cited.
The crisis of 1929 brought us back a fascist and Nazi movement that led to the Second World War. Don’t you think there is a similarity between that period and our own with the multiple crises of capitalism such as the subprime crisis of 2008, etc.? Is it a shortcut to say that these two eras are similar?
The big difference is that there is no Soviet Union, no Comintern, no worldwide communist movement to organize serious struggle against capitalist depredations. The collapse of the USSR has reduced the formerly large worldwide communist movement to a shadow of what it once was. It looks like it will be a long time before another world communist movement arises.
In your excellent books « Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy » and « Leon Trotsky’s collaboration with Germany and Japan » or « Trotsky’s amalgams« , you show that Leon Trotsky was involved in the military conspiracy and that he collaborated with Nazi Germany and Japan. In your opinion, why do your books disturb the establishment?
I wish my research had a greater impact than it does! “The establishment” – whatever you mean by that term – mainly ignores my work. So does the academic world – because the academic world of Russian and Soviet studies has always assisted capitalist anticommunism.
I am encouraged that many younger people, as well as many of older generations, continue to discover and appreciate my research. I have been told that it is helpful to them. I hope it is! We must know the truth about the achievements, as well as the errors, of the old communist movement, especially that of the Soviet Union, if we are to build a better world.
At the moment, Ukrainian propaganda relayed by the Western mainstream media accuses the USSR of having caused a famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, known as the Holodomor. Are we not faced with a historical lie? What can you tell us about this?
I don’t want to summarize all that I have written about it. See the first two chapters in my book “Blood Lies”, and the first chapter of my book “Stalin Waiting for … the Truth”. There I summarize the research of Professor Mark Tauger, of West Virginia University. He is the world’s expert on Russian and Soviet agriculture and famines. I cannot recommend his work highly enough! Naturally, his work is belittled and ignored by most mainstream “authorities,” including by Snyder (“Bloodlands”) and Stephen Kotkin (“Stalin. Waiting for Hitler, 1928 – 1941”).
The truth, as exposed by the best research, is that the famine of 1932-33 was caused by natural disasters: flood, drought, infestations of mice, crop diseases. Once the Stalin government learned this was the case, it began to give large-scale aid to the affected areas, including the Ukrainian SSR. With significant aid from the Soviet government the peasantry, though weakened by disease and many deaths, was able to bring in a good harvest and end the famine.
You wrote « The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre, the Evidence, the Solution« . The mainstream media blames the massacre on the Soviets, which is another historical lie. Aren’t we dealing with a primary anti-communism?
Yes, this is a lie, and an interesting one. The anticommunist Polish government-in-exile sided with the Nazis in supporting the Nazi story that it was the Soviets who had shot many thousands of Polish prisoners in 1940. The Soviets denied this, of course.
It appears that at some point after he had become First Secretary – sometime in the 1950s – Nikita Khrushchev began to sponsor a plan to blame Stalin and those closest to him for Katyn. This plan was cancelled, but some forged documents had been produced. This is the beginning of what is later known as “Closed Packet No. 1” (or “Secret Packet No. 1”). But a number of high-ranking Party figures had seen these forged documents, believed they were genuine, and were convinced that the Soviet Union had in fact murdered all these Polish prisoners.
So when Gorbachev and his men began to discuss confessing to Soviet guilt at Katyn – this is in the late 1980s – they believed that the Soviets were guilty at Katyn.
There is a lot of contradictory evidence – or what appears to be evidence – about Katyn. So I knew that I would have to study the Katyn question at some point. In 2018 I published the book whose title you cite about. I believe that I have established, by studying all the evidence that cannot have been faked, that the Soviets did not kill the Poles.
However, this has long since become a matter of “faith”, not of evidence. It is “taboo”, forbidden in the field of Soviet history, to doubt, much less deny, Soviet guilt at Katyn. It is illegal – literally against the law – to question Soviet guilt in some countries, for example in the Czech Republic, where a Czech communist has recently been sentenced to prison for publicly doubting Soviet guilt at Katyn, apparently based upon his publicizing an article of mine.
It is also illegal in Poland and in Ukraine, possibly in other countries too. It is de facto considered “beyond the Pale,” “taboo”, to question it in Western academia. Evidence has nothing to do with it – this is faith – anti-Stalin, anticommunist faith. The lie about Soviet guilt at Katyn is also strongly supported by the Trotskyist movement. Trotskyists repeat all the falsifications of openly pro-capitalist “authorities” since the cult of Trotsky rests upon Trotsky’s own lies about Stalin.
Every year since 2012, Russia has submitted a text to the UN denouncing the « glorification of Nazism » and recommending vigilance against modern forms of xenophobia and the rehabilitation of the Third Reich. On 4 November 2022, a vote took place at the UN and 52 countries voted against the Russian resolution, including France and other European countries as well as the United States, Ukraine and Canada. How do you explain that all the European countries that experienced the Second World War refused to condemn Nazism?
I don’t research this period. My guess would be that it is because Nazi-type acts are often committed by capitalist countries like Ukraine, but also by the US, in its support for fascists abroad, e.g. in South Korea, Vietnam (during the Vietnam War), Brazil, Argentina. Israel too is often guilty of Nazi-like acts against Palestinians, as even prominent Israelis admit.
Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
Who is Prof. Grover Furr?
Grover Carr Furr III (born April 3, 1944) is an American professor of medieval English literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He has published numerous books and articles on Soviet history, particularly on the Stalinist era. Born in Washington, DC, Furr graduated in 1965 from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with a BA in English. From 1965 to 1969 he was at Princeton University in the Department of Comparative Literature, with training in medieval British, German, Russian and French literature. Furr received his PhD from Princeton University in 1979. Since February 1970 he is a member of the faculty of Montclair State University in New Jersey, where he specializes in medieval English literature.
Professor Furr is the author of numerus books : Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every Revelation of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False (2011); The Murder of Sergei Kirov. History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (2013); Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False (2014); Trotsky’s Amalgams. Trotsky’s Lies, The Moscow Trials As Evidence, The Dewey Commission. Trotsky’s Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume One (2015); and Yezhov vs. Stalin: The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR (2016); Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (2018); The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre (2019); Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy: Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence; with the Complete Transcript of the “Tukhachevsky Affair” Trial (2021); The Fraud of the “Testament of Lenin” (2022).
Professor Furr website: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
