Stalin Biographies

he had that big dick/mass murderer vibe

Kotkin's kind of funny, because I think he takes the opposite tactic that other anti-communist historians do when it comes to the socialist states and Stalin. The typical approach for decades was to assume that they were disingenuous, something approximating the Nazi belief that bolshevism was actually a jewish plot. So Stalin didn't believe in communism, he just used it to build power. This can kind of serve as a warning, communism is all a lie and you can't trust anybody in power, which is why we need capitalism, individualism, and a weak state (except when it comes to the military and police)!

But Kotkin reaches his anti-communism by saying no, Stalin was an authentic communist, and so were many of the other revolutionary leaders at that time. They all believed in it strongly, and they frequently acted based on ideological goals to spread revolution or defend the ground it had gained. Of course, Kotkin points to Stalin's response during the internal party debate about whether or not collectivization would be too difficult to carry out of (paraphrasing) "Why did we have a revolution if we aren't going to be communists?" To Kotkin, the fact that Stalin carried out atrocities in the name of real communism is exactly why communism is bad, because any tragedies to Stalin's name can truly be said to be tragedies of communist ideology.

Which is why Kotkin is a good writer about Stalin. He puts some charged words in here and there, passes some judgement, but overall he is very honest about Stalin because he wants you to know that he wasn't a cartoonish sadist, and that he usually had a justification for how whatever he was doing served the interests of Soviet and global communism.

Yeah this. I would add that unlike other anti-communist historians, Kotkin doesn't deploy Trotsky's critiques either. So there's an interesting situation where anti-communist and communists can read his books and take different conclusions from them.

Personally, I think Stalin presents some problems for communists and I agree with Kotkin that the atrocities were carried out in the name of real communism and so on. But I also see Stalin as this Robespierre-like figure. See, from that, anyone who can rub a few brain cells together can see that saying that communism = Stalin doesn't really tell you much; it'd be like saying liberal republics = Robespierre. It happens to be true but it's also just not that interesting. There are not many people these days losing sleep over how they're going to deal with the "Robespierre question" or what that means for liberal democracy.

I cringe so hard everytime Kotkin talks about how communists don't care about "freedom", but generally Kotkin is the greatest non communist commentator on communism.

there's also Sheila Fitzpatrick who seems pretty honest and dispassionate to me

Cucked tier

"Nuance" tier

☭ტანკერი☭

Pub Quiz tier

Think these are probably the names you'll mostly encounter around the discussion.

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ftfy

Conquest is liar, he is author of the "muh bajilions killed by Stalin himself" and even he lowered the number of victims at least twice during his life.

Montefiore is popular thanks to myth of "2 million german women raped by Red army".

Both retards.

Wasn't it just nazi propaganda that popularized the myth?

Ludo Martens

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Anthony Beevor popularized it in the west

Well, actually yes.

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What do you think of this one?

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I know the first one is dedicated to Robert Conquest and is full of total bullshit.

Can you be specific about what Conquest and Montefiore have lied about? I know some numbers are exaggerated but i wasnt aware of outright lies

conquest doesn't just exaggerate, he literally made it all up. for an example of Montefiore, I was looking in that book for info about Beria and it literally says "some skeletons were found in the place he lived, there's no evidence that he's responsible for them but he was so sadistic that he probably did it." actually, I can't even find any evidence that there WERE skeletons in his house (a centuries-old building). just a couple articles from the 90s with no pictures, no followup, etc.

anybody know when Domenico Losurdo's Stalin biography will be out in english?

There's an unofficial but pretty good translation of it. One of my favorite books on Stalin.

have you read it? what you think?

A good over-view of Conquest was done by acquaintance of mine. They point out what I mean.
- quora.com/Robert-Conquest-vs-Arch-Getty-totalitarian-vs-revisionist-theories-in-Sovietology-which-do-you-consider-the-most-reliable-source-of-knowledge-Inspired-by-the-many-answers-marked-with-ignorance-and-bias-in-the-light-of-Russian-disclosed-archives/answer/Cass-Dean

yep, I actually wrote a debunk on that that was screencapped and put on leftybooru for precisely that claim.

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There is a list of sources on Stalin in pic related

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Any sources debunking/exposing their bullshit in their books?

Nyet! I've just started reading it. English isn't my first language so it will take me some time to finish it. That's why I wanted to know whether this book is worth my time

He made up numbers. Some Polish guy calculated how many people should have lived in USSR in year X vs. how many actually lived (less than calculated). And Conquest used this data to come to his gorillions

That's the same method used with China

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This guy is the author of the number of "60 million victims of soviet repressions" used by Solzhenitsyn in GULag Archipelago.
He worked for nazi propaganda during the war and after war he worked for american propaganda (russian emigrant, respectively)

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His name is I. A. Koshkin (Kurganov)