When someone doubts a fact like “Stalin is a criminal”, we may question our information again, what did Stalin do? Many evidences of cruelty may come to mind: the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, the Gulag, and the mass transportation of many groups inside the vast geography of Eurasian plateaus. Here, the communist friend who questions these facts offers a book that provides evidence for such skepticism, “Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend” written by the communist Italian communist historian Domenico Losurdo. I thought that a short strategic reading of the book and a bit of criticism wouldn’t hurt.
Losurdo mentions that the French president visited the Soviet Union and particularly Ukraine but he denied the existence of a “terror famine” that was intentionally organized by the state. The French prime minister denied also the claimed severity of the famine. Then Losurdo cites Italian reports on policies to strengthen the Ukrainian identity to encourage Ukrainians in Poland to return. The reports also mention some emergency actions done by the state to reduce the famine impacts such as the contribution of soldiers in farming. There is no respected reference for such “diplomatic reports” except a paper written by Losurdo himself. It wasn’t clear what resources he was talking about, but they clearly showed that there was a famine. Also, since when prime ministers’ visits could be used as a measure of the severity of some economic crisis in a huge country like Russia?
Losurdo then moves to another sort of evidence, which is not necessary or even acceptable in any academic or logical context, it is the Western colonial countries terror famines. What is its importance when I defend Stalin? Is it to show me my choices or is it to tell this is how the world works? He also lists natural famines, or at least those not caused directly by states, which are much more common than “terror famines”. What cannot be overlooked and is not explained by Losurdo is the fact that it was there was at least a form of bad administration that is no less egregious than Mao Zedong’s war against the sparrows. Criticizing Stalin’s management of the country and the economy is even worse than accusing him of intentional action, as it shows how foolishness and mismanagement can cause things that intentional actions do not.
In the years of the Ukrainian famine, there was no global climate crisis or some disease that impacted grains. However, there were many soviet policies that caused the deterioration of rural life over the years. Such policies indirectly destroyed the villages. What gives suspicions about whether these policies were intended to cause famine in Ukraine is the fact that the Soviet Union was actually able to export one million tons of grains to Europe in the famine year. Trying to reduce the impact of the famine and show it as an exaggerated economic crisis isn’t supported by simplest statistical evidence such as the figures of population distribution over gender and age groups. Such figures show usually a bottleneck whenever there’s a disaster such as famines or wars, which is the case in Ukrainian statistics that show such bottleneck.
Coming to the Gulag, Losurdo never mentions two famous reports published by the Soviet Union about the number of those who were executed or imprisoned in the Gulag, the reports are both Kruglov report and Shvernik report. Unwisely, Losurdo cites Oleg Khlevniuk, the expert on Russian prisons during the soviet era, who mentioned (assuming it’s accurate) that prisoners were in some cases able to choose if they wanted a vegetarian meal. But can we also believe Khlevniuk when he said that Stalin was executing and imprisoning no less than one million persons per year? Khlevniuk isn’t famous for his views particularly but for his analysis of a huge amount of data that was released recently about prisons in the Soviet Union.
Anne Applebaum is another historian who is highly cited by Losurdo for enhancing the image of the Gulag. Applebaum is also famous for saying: “In both societies, the creation of concentration camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization”. According to her, 18 million people have died or were imprisoned in the Gulag. Can we just believe the experts Applebaum and Khlevniuk who tell us everything about the Gulag’s atrocities?
But maybe we don’t need Losurdo to give justifications or to enhance the image of the Gulag. He already mentions his opinion:
“The prison system reproduces the relations of the society in which it is expressed. In the USSR, inside and outside the Gulag, we fundamentally see in action a developmentalist dictatorship that seeks to mobilize and “reeducate” all forces, with the purpose of overcoming secular backwardness, becoming yet more urgent due to the approaching war that, by the explicit declaration of Mein Kampf, is to be one of enslavement and annihilation. In this scenario, the terror in the USSR is combined with the emancipation of the oppressed nationalities, as well as a strong upward social mobility and with access to education, culture, and even to management and leadership positions by parts of the social strata that until that time had been totally marginalized.”
Losurdo also explains that the time was limited for dealing with people who were unknown whether being loyal or could be used as a “fifth column”. The solution is to neutralize them in the Gulag! Does Losrudo accept to be neutralized in some Gulag in a similar scenario considering his loyalty was different than to be possibly guessed by a secret service agent?
Losurdo never misses his arguments to compare with US crimes mentioning that in some years black Americans were dying at a similar rate to the Gulag. Thank you, Losurdo, are these our only choices?
Here I felt I didn’t need to criticize such arguments for a longer time. No need to read the book for sure.
When we read history, we can never get the full image, but we can get two things: a story that somehow affects our model of how the humanity should be, and information. Denying information can keep our model intact. But it’s heavy to carry wrong information in order to defend a historical icon. Stalin is an icon, like any religious icon. People like Losurdo write to make him a good person in a new corrected story. The only problem of humanizing the icon is it hides or changes a lot of information; it betrays the truth.