Yezhov Vs. Stalin: The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called 'Great Terror'

Huckster And Crank Grover Furr Denies History of Stalinist Purges And Murders-Bay Area Stalinists Try To Revive Stalin

https://www.scribd.com/document/229104073/Grover-Fur-Debunked

The documents by Grover Furr I have been reading on Soviet history form another set of ex- amples. Grover is a long time communist, English professor and amateur historian. He has undertaken a project to prove that the original Soviet ex- planations of the purges and purge trials are being factually substantiated by real evidence (including the materials in the Soviet archives).

Having a particular interest in Soviet his- tory and being urged by a good friend to engage Grover, I have read his stuff. I have to say it is one of the most astonishing projects of pseudo-research I have seen (outside of creationist anti- evolution efforts). I am thinking in particular of one major document by Grover, “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan.” It appeared in Cultural Logic for 2009, and it appears on Grover’s site with the simple claim:

“On the evidence there’s no doubt that Trotsky conspired with the Germans and Japanese as alleged during the second and third Moscow Trials of January 1937 and March 1938.”

What follows (when you print and read his piece) is virtually every kind of logical fallacy we have listed above. There is in fact, no evidence that Trotsky “conspired with the Germans and Japanese as al- leged.” And what is alleged is after all both major and very specific: That Trotsky was a paid agent of the fascists, that he conspired to overthrow socialism, kill the communist leaders and help carve up the Soviet Union between the various Axis powers!

I want to say, in passing, that Grover does occasionally debunk the most extreme and deceitful anticommunist claims. There are lots of ridiculous charges (example: that Stalin deliberately unleashed famine in the Ukraine as a form of genocide against Ukrainian peo- ple). And Grover does help refute them in some of his documents. But his other delusional work discredits such refutations.

In his specific and most energetic claims (i.e. that the official Soviet allegations in the show trials were credible and proven) Grover has to fall back on misdirection. The only evidence of those old school purge-trial charges remains the “evidence” presented in those trials: the confessions of men in prison, men who facing death penalties, fear for their families and possible torture. If one has a sceptical attitude toward confessions under such conditions, then there is no other evidence of the core allegations.

Grover’s writings do everything we’ve been discussing:

For example they prove (in great detail) that Trotsky and others formed a political group with a specific program, and alliances, and sought to struggle for their line (and for the replacement of the party currents that were then in power). In other words, he proves that there was a political opposition (or rather several) within the CPSU(B) and its various levels.

But, that is obvious to everyone and does not need proving. And by proving the existence of a political opposition you have not proven that Leon Trotsky worked for the Nazis. It is (as the “fallacies” document discusses) an example of red herring, non sequitor, slippery slope exaggeration.

That method appears over and over in much of Grover’s work — he documents and proves all kinds of things with baroque flourishes of detail, but just not what he claims to have proven.

While Grover claims to have evidence, a lot of his case revolves around a “special pleading” about why there actually is no real evidence. He argues that the conspirators would not have written anything down, and evidence would have been carefully destroyed, and so on.

But in fact, it is not possible for a major conspiracy and spy network riddled the Soviet Union in service to the Axis government with- out some evidence (if only in Nazi records) — conferences, reports, directives, funding records... as the news of this conspiracy went up and down the Nazi chain of command.

The fact that six decades of historical research (including into German, Japanese and Soviet government archives) has not produced any evidence of a vast complex espionage operation (of the kind the Soviets al- leged) shows that there was no such opera- tion.

The Trotskyist opposition was a political line struggle within the ruling Soviet party. Their political program may well have been disastrous (and I believe it was), but the Stalin-era assertion that oppositionists were secret Nazis was wrong (politically, theoretically and factually) — even if Stalin himself may have believed it and then demanded that subordi- nates document it.

Grover also makes a classic “excluded middle” argument: by saying that anyone opposing his arguments is therefore clearly influenced by the anticommunist arguments — as if these historical matters exist on a simple binary grid where you either agree with Vyshinsky (channelled through Grover Furr) or take your side with Robert Conquest. And so in Grover’s work, other analyses of these events (by scholars known for not being anti- communist) don’t make much of an appearance.

Grover also lavishly argues using “weasel words,” “proof by verbosity” (seemingly end- less verbosity) and “appeal to author- ity” (both his own and Stalin’s).

I’m particularly struck by the argument (that has appeared in various places) that we have to accept Grover’s scholarly authority because he has spent years on this mission, read in the Soviet archives personally, and because we don’t ourselves speak Russian in order to dissect the primary material. This is all logically false.

First, Grover is hardly the only person who had plumbed those archives — and there are major works that provide many key documents in English so that we can all explore key and revealing sections of the primary material. I’m thinking, in particular, of J. Arch Getty’s The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self -Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939.

Further, those communists who defended the purges and show trials “down the line” were (for sixty years) totally disinterested in data and evidence — and were rather militant about proclaiming their beliefs without evidence. They didn’t care about evidence. And for someone to claim now (suddenly) that none of us (not one) has any right to an opinion here without learning Russian (!) and spending years in Moscow archives...because we (supposedly) just don’t know the evi- dence...

And at the same time, to claim that the massive evidence against their own theories must be permanently suspect (because it comes from KGB controlled archives). Well, the switcheroos and double-think are a bit much to bear. (our emphasis—Ed)

It is not as if the Russian archives are a new thing — they have been open for literally decades. Or as if no honest man (other than Grover Furr) has gone there. If there was really any new real evidence establishing the existence of a big world-circling Nazi-Trotsky network of spies and assassins — don’t you think it would have leaked into public view?

It has even been mentioned in discussion that Grover Furr has gotten publicity for his views within the modern Russian press where interviews with him are published. So? That is an example of the logical fallacy called “the bandwagon effect” — and I have to add that getting a theory promoted in the Russian media is hardly evidence of credibility. Russian politics is notorious for its love of crack- pot and paranoid theories of many kinds (especially if they, unlike Grover’s theories, have an anti-Semitic underbelly).

It would take a month to dissect Grover’s article on the Trotsky-Nazi connection, and unravel all the various levels of misdirection. But the fact remains that there is not embedded in it any piece of evidence (at all!) that documents his claims.

I have asked him (several times) to simply email me a one or two sentence message that mentions the single fact that he believes best documents this alleged conspiracy. And I’m still waiting. We don’t actually need seventy pages of hemming and hawing — a one paragraph description of one real documented fact would suffice to put Grover’s theory on a different plane (a report in a Nazi file, a pay stub, a memoir from one of the architects of the conspiracy, one eye witness account that isn’t a prisonhouse confession... one simple real piece of evidence of any kind of the actual allegations that Grover says are confirmed.)

Here too the issue really is line and avoidance of line:

Stalin claimed that antagonist classes had disappeared in the 1930s Soviet Union and so the only material basis for widespread opposition was the actions of old class elements who had wormed their way into power in close alliance with paid agents of foreign enemies. It is a particular theory about the political oppositions within the Communist Party.

Mao by contrast (based on an assessment of both Stalin’s theories and Soviet history) concluded that there was a material basis within socialism and within the Communist Party for “capitalist roaders” to emerge and contend for power. It is an opposing theory. By announcing that the official Soviet explanation for their purges were factually correct, Grover is making a statement on a crucial (dare I say world historic) question of “where do the forces of capitalist restoration come from?”

And he does so in the guise of an objective scholarly exploration of historical evidence — and so does not engage his own views of this theoretical question, and does not seriously engage the Maoist counter-position.

It is a two-line struggle over a major question waged (among communists) using a method of bogus factual “proof” based on bogus claims of obscure evidence.

Butovo firing range
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butovo_firing_range
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Coordinates: 55°32′00″N 37°35′39″E

The map of the mass graves
The Butovo Firing Range or Butovo Shooting Range (Russian: Бутовский полигон) is a former private estate near the village of Drozhzhino (Russian: Дрожжино) in the Yuzhnoye Butovo District south of Moscow that was seized by the Soviets after the 1917 revolution and thereafter used by their secret police as an agricultural colony, shooting range, and from 1938 to 1953 as a site for executions and mass graves of persons deemed "enemies of the people." During Josef Stalin's Great Terrorfrom 1937 to 1938, more than 20,000 political prisoners were transported to the site and executed by gunshot. Victims included Béla Kun, Gustav Klutsis, Seraphim Chichagov, and a number of Orthodox priests later canonized as the New Martyrs. The Russian Orthodox Church took over the ownership of the lot in 1995 and had a large Russian Revival memorial church erected there. The mass grave may be visited on weekends.
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Great Purges
2 Notable Deaths
3 See also
4 References
History[edit]
Until the 19th century, the site was occupied by a small settlement by the name of Kosmodemyanskoye Drozhino, first attested in 1568 as owned by a local boyarFyodor Drozhin. The estate's owner in 1889 was N.M. Solovov, who turned it into a large stud farm and had a large hippodrome built there. His descendant, I.I. Zimin, wisely donated the stud farm to the state in the aftermath of the October Revolution in exchange for the right to flee the country. The farm then became the property of the Red Army.[1]
In the 1920s, the site, now officially named Butovo, was ceded to the infamous OGPU. In 1935 it was turned into a small firing range for the NKVD. The remaining grounds of the former farm were occupied by a sovkhoz, Kommunarka, and the dacha of Genrikh Yagoda.

Some of those executed at Butovo
Great Purges
During the Great Purges, the cemeteries of nearby Moscow could not cope with the number of victims of Soviet terror. Because of that, in late 1936 both the firing range and the nearby sovkhoz Kommunarka were turned into a Special Object, or a secret mass murder site operated by the NKVD.
The exact number of victims executed there remains unknown, as only fragmentary data has been declassified by NKVD's successor services.[2] Some sources cite between 10 and 14 thousand people murdered at Kommunarka and additional 20,765 at Butovo,[3] the latter number includes only those executed between August 1, 1937 and October 19, 1938.[2]Reportedly the most busy day at the firing range was February 28, 1938 when 562 people were executed on the same day.[3] The site remained heavily guarded by Soviet and later Russian secret police until 1995, when it was sold to Russian Orthodox Church.

A wooden chapel "on blood"
Notable Deaths[edit]
Among those killed and buried at Butovo were Soviet military commander Hayk Bzhishkyan, Russian statesman Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and politician Nikolai Krylenko, former leader of Hungary Béla Kun, Latvian painter Aleksandr Drevin, Latvian film actress Marija Leiko, bishop Seraphim Chichagov, Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy, Latvian photographer Gustav Klutsis, and over 250 leading cadres of the German Communist Party (KPD), for example Hermann Taubenberger and Walter Haenisch, with the explicit approval of party leaders Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht, and partly blackmailed to the NKVD by Herbert Wehner, who at this time was still a member of the German KP Politburo.

A Pathetic Defence of Stalinist Repressions
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3616.html
Mainstream Weekly
Home page > Archives (2006 on) > 2012 > A Pathetic Defence of Stalinist Repressions
MAINSTREAM, VOL L, NO 33, AUGUST 4, 2012
A Pathetic Defence of Stalinist Repressions
Thursday 9 August 2012, by Anil Rajimwale
BOOK REVIEW

Khrushchev Lied by Grover Furr; Erythros Press and Media, LLC, Kettering, Ohio, USA; 2011; pages 423.

One can understand praise for Josef Stalin’s positive contributions which in fact are many, no doubt, but one can’t digest open defence of not simply mistakes but of the organised repressions and physical eliminations by Stalin and his group in the course of the history of the USSR and CPSU. The book at hand is a whole hog justification of the most brutal arrests, tortures, killings and conspiracies against the vast number of honest and dedicated Soviet Communists and other people. Their number runs into millions and is still inestimable. Leave aside the Western and other ‘propaganda’, outstanding Soviet and non-Soviet Communist leaders like Marshal Zhukov, Andrei Gromyko, Marshal Chuikov, Alexei Tolstoy, RPD (Rajni Palme Dutt), and countless others have confirmed the gory events mirroring the dark side of the Stalinist regime.

The book at hand takes portions of the ‘Secret’ Khrushchev Report delivered at the 20th CPSU Congress of 1956 on Stalin’s cult of personality, and tries to ‘show’, without success, that they are ‘lies’. Far worse, the author tries to defend the inhuman atrocities, repressions, tortures, confinements to the infamous ‘Gulags’ of millions of innocents, and their shooting and killings, again without success. We are not going into each and every detail of the Khrushchev Report and whether they are accurate on this or that detail. But the fact is that the Report and the 20th CPSU Congress shook the world communist movement (WCM) to its very roots. One of the major pillars of the WCM was its worship of Stalin’s personality, justified or unjustified. The cult blinded the movement to the events of repressions in the Soviet Union and later in the East European and other countries professing socialism, as also to the actual socio-economic and political processes that led to serious crises. It covered up total lack of democracy in the Soviet Union and the concentration of power in the hands of, not just the CC or the Polit-Bureau, which in fact existed only in name, but in the hands of just one person, namely, Josef Stalin. This is precisely what Lenin had foreseen, but even he may not have imagined the lowest depths and extent of brutal repressions and tortures against and the killings of the most outstanding revolutionaries and Bolsheviks like Bukharin, Kamenev, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, Marshal Blyukher, Marshal Rokossovsky, Rykov, Tomsky, Krzhizhanovsky, Makarenko, Sholokhov, Maxim Gorki himself, to name only a few. They may have committed mistakes, but so did Stalin and Lenin himself.

For a revolutionary, the most heinous crime is to arrest and torture a fellow revolutionary for the slightest ‘mistake’ or no mistake. In such acts, the Soviet regime followed the ‘philosophy of the guillotine’ of the French Revolution rather than that of a socialist revolution.

The revelations began to pour in not only through Khrushchev but also from many other personalities, who began to openly describe the details. The Communist Party of China at that time fully supported the criticism of the cult of personality. Polish, Italian and many other Communists and democrats suffered; the Polish party was wiped out. Even Indian revolutionaries like Abani Mukherjee and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya were arrested and shot in 1937. These were no revolutionary or socialist acts!

There can be no justification for these at all. But the book tries to justify repression and violations of democracy in every way.

Lacunae in the Book

The book claims to ‘reveal’ the lie in the Khrushchev Report. In reality the book itself is full of lacunae, which confirm rather than deny the acts of repressions of the period. For example, on p. 347 in Chapter 33 on “Commnaders Killed”, the author, in order to defend Stalin, tries to indict and attack one of his security deputy Yezhov, a top NKVD personality next only to Beria. He was arrested and shot on Stalin’s and Beria’s orders. The author reveals much while defending Stalin’s repressions but ‘criticising’ Yezhov in the following words:

“None of this means that all military commanders who were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and executed were guilty. Ezhov (the spelling is different here—A.R.) and his henchmen no doubt framed a good many of them, as he did hundreds of thousands of other innocent persons.” (First bold emphasis author’s; the underlined emphasis mine.—A.R.)

This quote is interesting and tells a lot of things. The author of the book admits that ‘a good many’ were falsely framed, and these good many numbered ‘hundreds of thousands’! So, during the brief tenure of Yezhov as the security chief under Stalin, a huge number of people were framed, ‘imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and executed’. This job started before Yezhov and continued after him, with its highs and lows. The number thus easily ran into millions! And who was responsible?! Our friend, Grover Furr, is silent on this point except criticising Yezhov who was there only carrying out orders. What were Stalin and Beria doing when ‘hundreds of thousands’ were being deported, tortured and killed? Keeping quiet? Did they not know? Who ordered Yezhov to carry out these measures? The answer is clear even to a school-child. In his enthusiasm to defend Stalin’s repressions, Furr has let the cat, and the truth with it, out of the bag.

It is clear that the various chiefs of the repressive security system (NKVD at that time) like Yakir, Yezhov, and others were no more than hand-maidens of Beria and Stalin: they could be appointed any time, praised to the skies, and when the job was done or over-done, could be arrested, tortured and shot at will to cover up their own deeds or responsibilities. And Stalin thus could continue to garner the fruits of achievements as ‘the Great leader’, who ‘kept awake while the world slept’. In fact, hundreds of thousands were being sent to permanent sleep in the vast ‘Gulags’. These are the realities of the darkest recesses of the Stalinist period. Another thing strikes one in the above-mentioned passage. It is the casualness with which the author of the book has mentioned the acts of repressions and tortures and killings. It is so easy, so casual with him, so trivial a fact which does not matter much. Really, such must have been the mentality of the brutal Beria-Stalin bureaucracy working against the genuine revolutionaries.

Bukharin, Others: Counter-revolutionaries?!

The book does not present a single proof of Bukharin and a host of others being ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘conspiring’ to overthrow the Soviet regime. Some of the best revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, particularly those associated with Lenin, were systematically eliminated during the Stalin period. How did Bukharin, the creator of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which was also known as ‘Bukharin Constitution’, suddenly become ‘counter-revolutionary’? He was brutally tortured and then shot. No solid grounds have been presented till today. That great philosopher and theoretician wrote one of the outstanding Marxist works on philosophy while in prison, titled Philosophical Arabesques, in the most difficult conditions, and he and his wife specially requested the authorities not to destroy the manuscripts. The manuscripts were carelessly kept away in a corner of a table and forgotten. It was only in the late eighties that they were discovered and printed in the early nineties. This work was a great contribution of a ‘counter-revolutionary’!

Another ‘counter-revolutionary’, Trotsky, was writing articles on philosophy and formal logic just before he was murdered. Stalin could never have come anywhere near these great Marxist thinkers, and he used the state machinery to suppress them on blatantly false charges. Any number of names could be given. But the author himself has unwittingly admitted that hundreds of thousands of innocents were repressed. We do not need to make further comments.

One only hopes such crimes are not defended but are brought to light to draw lessons and underline the contributions of the victims of repressions.

The book also ‘counters’ the arguments that the party and the state functioning rapidly lost whatever democracy there was in the USSR. One does not need to undertake any major research to establish this fact: only two party Congresses were held during the Stalin regime, very sporadic CC meetings which were never full, and half-attended, half heartedly conducted Polit-Bureu meetings, more in the nature of ‘consultations’ among a few confidants of Stalin. All these so-called ‘meetings’ met under the shadow of the security agencies, and therefore no one dared to speak out his mind (there was hardly a ‘her’ in the CC). During Lenin’s time before and after the revolution, the party Congresses and conferences met almost every year or every second or third year, even if they had to run from place to place to hide from the police etc. And the CC meetings, there were so many of them.

Krupskaya killed Lenin?!