A response to Reddit user International_KB on r/AskHistorians
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3idnj0/comment/cufpcon
>Furr is pretty much out of step with all of them.
Appeal to authority. Also, this is only true if you completely exclude Russian historians and only focus on the West.
>In short: there's plenty of evidence as to Stalin's responsibility. He literally signed death warrants.
Incorrect. He (and others) signed the penalty that the NKVD would request from the judge. The judges could and did reject these sentences when defendants were innocent.
>First things first, it's important to note that Furr is not a historian.
Ad hominem. Also, he has a minor in medieval history, where he learned to critically examine primary sources, because many medieval figures are demonized by their opponents, much like Stalin.
>None of these positions are supported by actual historians who write on the topic today.
Again they are supported by Russian historians.
>The arguments that Furr constructs to support these rely on arbitrarily dismissing evidence as fake (including signed orders from Stalin and Molotov's recollections), disingenuous semantics, simply accepting Soviet categories at face value, dismissing all those who disagree as 'anti-communist' stooges, etc. And Furr is proud of being beyond the 'mainstream'.
Not arbitrarily. Russian historians, namely Pavel Polyan, have dismissed Stalin's supposed signed order on the "Khaibakh massacre" as fake, because it was "released" by Yeltsin and does not fit historical facts. Molotov's memoirs were written by Chuev with no witnesses and have inconsistencies.
>There were 874,074 executions recorded by the NKVD between 1928 and 1953, the vast majority of which fell during the Purge years of 1937-38. ... Yet what's not in doubt is that millions did indeed die due to deliberate action by the Soviet state. Michael Ellman, in his useful summary of the different estimates (Soviet Repression Statistics), puts the figure at 1-1.2m for 1937-38 alone.
You just said the official number was 850,000. Then you cite one guy who claims 1 million. In any case, it was certainly not MILLIONS due to DELIBERATE action, if you're counting Soviet citizens and not Nazis and their allies. (Not to mention how many of those executed were in fact guilty of treason and terrorism.)
>There can be little question that the decision to launch the Purges was Stalin's and that he was fully aware of the actions of Ezhov's NKVD. Here I'm going to just quote from Suny's Structure of Soviet History:
>Stalin guided and prodded forward the arrests, show trials and executions, aided by the closest members of his entourage: Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Mikoyan and Ezhov. ...
> One note to Ezhov will suffice to give the type of intervention that the vozhd'[leader] engaged in. In May 1937 he wrote: "One might think that prison for Beloborodov is a podium for reading speeches, statements which refer to the activities of all sorts of people but not himself. Isn't it time to squeeze this gentleman and make him tell about his dirty deeds? Where is he, in prison or a hotel?"
The first paragraph is unsourced. The second paragraph only demonstrates that Stalin did indeed want to pressure some prisoners. (A man named Walter is another example found within the istmat archive.) It does not at all demonstrate that Stalin was "FULLY" aware of the actions of the NKVD, particularly the ILLEGAL actions of falsifying interrogation transcripts and confession statements in order to frame the innocent. Since multiple NKVD officials had to be present for these documents to be signed, either Stalin knew - which we have no evidence of - or Yezhov engaged in a concerted secret conspiracy, as he confessed shortly after his arrest.
>Critically, it was his orders in July 1937 that broadened the scope of the repression into the 'mass operations' ...
That of the Politburo, but sure. Furr goes over that in "Yezhov vs Stalin" and "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform".
>and he was involved in the setting/monitoring of regional quotas to control the process
Again the Politburo, and they were NOT quotas but maximum limits. Furr goes over this in the same two texts. If only you'd actually read him.
>It was also his initiative to simultaneously launch the 'national operations' against national minorities.
Correct, Stalin approved the deportations. I have not seen Furr contest this.
>In this Oleg Khlevniuk has cast Ezhov as merely the 'executor of his master's will'.
>There's a huge degree of nuance and discussion in academia over Stalinism, with plenty of conflicting theories out there. But Furr is not part of that...
Read: WESTERN academia.
>On the role of Stalin: This is so hot right now.
>Ellman... Khlevniuk... Wheatcroft... Rees... Getty... Hagenloh... Shearer...
Khlevniuk is an extreme anti-communist. Getty is an anarchist. The rest are somewhere in between. ALL live in the West and are not communist. Of course Russians are completely excluded from the discourse.
Furr, maybe alone, has worked with Russians (not those exiled to the West, like Khlevniuk) like Vladimir Bobrov and Yuri Zhukov. Pavel Polyan is the one who dismisses Stalin's order on Khaibakh as fake. Boris Borisov went on the offensive and attributed 7.5 million deaths to the US Dust Bowl (a capitalist-engineered famine) and Great Depression (capitalist crisis) of the 1930s.
And there is no shortage of Russians denying that the Soviets committed Katyn. In April 2023, as Russia no longer sought good relations with Poland, the Russian (capitalist) government admitted the evidence against the Soviets was lacking.
Btw, the original allegation that the Soviets did it comes from the Nazis, who "discovered" the bodies. It began to be repeated by the British and exiled Poles after WWII despite the Soviet investigation.
In conclusion, International_KB is not a historian. He is a Redditor whose interests happen to wander. He has published no peer-reviewed papers in relevant journals and he is entirely unnoticed by actual historians, like the great Grover Furr.