[Reader-list] Book Review: “Khrushchev Lied” by Grover Furr

[A. Mani]

Source: theclassstruggle.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/against-revisionism-“khrushchev-lied”-by-grover-furr/

Against Revisionism: “Khrushchev Lied” by Grover Furr

Nov 5


The historian J.A. Getty, one of the most respected authorities on
Soviet history, remarked of the Stalin-era:

“For no other period or topic have historians been so eager to write
and accept history-by-anecdote. Grand analytical generalizations have
come from second-hand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp
stories (‘My friend met Bukharin’s wife in a camp and she said…’) have
become primary sources on central political decision making. The need
to generalize from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed
rumours into sources and has equated repetition of stories with
confirmation. Indeed, the leading expert on the Great Purges has
written that ‘truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay’
and that ‘basically the best though not infallible sources is rumour.’
As long as the unexplored classes of sources include archival and
press material, it is neither safe nor necessary to rely on rumour or
anecdote.”

The “leading expert” to whom Getty was referring was, of course,
Robert Conquest, whose emotionally-charged books on the Stalin-era,
such as “Harvest of Sorrow” and “The Great Terror”, did more than
perhaps any others to ingrain in people’s minds the notion of Stalin
as “the ruthless dictator”. This image was, however, inherited from
the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev whose infamous “Secret Speech” at
the 20th Congress of CPSU claimed to “lift the lid” on the hitherto
hidden terror of Stalinism. As Grover Furr notes in his book on the
speech (provocatively entitled “Khrushchev Lied”):

“This speech is often referred to as one of the ‘revelations’ by
Khrushchev of crimes and misdeeds done by Stalin. The issue of the
‘cult of personality’, or ‘cult of the individual’, around the figure
of Stalin was the main subject of the speech. […] The ‘Secret Speech’
threw the world communist movement into crisis. But the claim was that
all the damage done was necessary, prophylactic. An evil part of the
past, largely unknown to the communists of the world and even of the
USSR, had to be exposed, a potentially fatal cancer in the body of
world communism had to be mercilessly excised, so that the movement
could correct itself and once again move towards its ultimate goal.”

The fall-out from this speech cannot be underestimated. It led to a
rift in the world communist movement between the two largest socialist
nations, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union (the
“Sino-Soviet Split” as it is referred to by historians), as well as a
rift between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of Albania.
The Albanians and the Chinese rejected both the image of the
Stalin-era that was being presented by Khrushchev and the way that
phoney image was being used as justification for revisions of the
central tenants of Marxism-Leninism. The anti-revisionist movement was
thus born.

An equally important result of the ‘Secret Speech’ was that it
reinvigorated the decaying Trotskyist movement. As Furr notes:

“Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the ‘Secret Speech’ echoed
Trotsky’s earlier demonization of Stalin. But in 1956 Trotskyism was a
marginal force, its murdered leader most often dismissed as a
megalomaniacal failure. Khrushchev’s speech breathed new life into
Trotsky’s all-but-dead caricature of Stalin. Communists and
anti-communists alike began to view Trotsky as a ‘prophet’. Had he not
said things very similar to what Khrushchev had just ‘revealed’ to be
true? They dusted off Trotsky’s little-read works. Trotsky’s
reputation, and that of his followers, soared. That the ‘Secret
Speech’ constituted an unacknowledged ‘rehabilitation’ of Trotsky was
recognized by Trotsky’s widow Sedova who, within a day of the Speech,
applied to the Presidium of the 20th Party Congress for full
rehabilitation for both her late husband and her son.”

Trotskyism thus re-emerged as a force within the working-class
movement and, often trading off its apparently sharp-eyed analysis of
the Soviet Union, rose to become one of the most persistent features
of the Western political spectrum.

Indeed, in a very real sense it may be said that the ‘Secret Speech’
was the birth of modern Marxism. After all, what modern strand of
Marxism has not been shaped by its views on the Stalin-era? “Western
Marxism” (the Frankfurt School, Hegelian-Marxism etc.) sought to
develop a “non-totalitarian” Marxism and much of its work is pregnant
with ruminations about “terror” and the necessity for the “freedom of
the individual” to safe-guard against it. “Luxemburgism” and
“Anarchism” which came to believe that the Leninist political project
itself inevitably ended in tyranny and repression. And, of course,
“Trotskyism” which we have already touched upon.

The publication of Grover Furr’s, “Khrushchev Lied”, is therefore an
event of great import. Having spent the past ten years buried in the
infamous Soviet archives (or at least, those sections of it which are
now available to be studied – much of the archives are still too
politically-charged to be considered for opening by the current
Russian government) he has now produced a book, based on his research,
which makes an outrageous claim:

“Not one specific statement of ‘revelation’ that Khrushchev made about
either Stalin or [Lavrenti] Beria [former head of the NKVD] turned out
to be true. Among those that can be checked for verification, every
single one turns out to be false. Khrushchev, it turns out, did not
just ‘lie’ about Stalin and Beria – he did virtually nothing else
except lie. The entire ‘Secret Speech’ is made up of fabrications.”

The book has already caused a storm in Russian academic circles and is
beginning to make an impact in the United States, as well. As
Professor Roger Keeran of Empire State College has remarked: “Grover
Furr’s study demands a complete rethinking of Soviet history,
socialist history, indeed world history of the 20th century.” This is
not an overstatement.

Among the most important claims debunked by Furr are:

-          Stalin supported and fostered a ‘cult of personality’. Furr
demonstrates that not only did Stalin not actively foster any such
‘cult’, he spent a great deal of his time actively fighting against
it. Khrushchev, on the other hand, emerges as one of the leading
proponents of the cult, for his own self-serving political motives.

-          Stalin embarked on ‘mass repressions’ within the Bolshevik
party. This claim has already been tackled by earlier historians and
writers (including Ludo Martens, in his book “Another View of Stalin”)
but it is Furr who really puts it to bed with reams and reams of
primary sources to refute it. Furr also successfully rehabilitates
Lavrenti Beria, the man who is often accused of being “Stalin’s
executioner” in his role as head of the NKVD.

-          Stalin stifled internal party debate and ruled the Soviet
Union as a ‘dictator’. Furr provides an impressive collection of
primary sources which document that Stalin was committed to internal
party democracy and that he made no special fetish of his position of
power.

In total, Furr identifies and debunks sixty individual lies or
half-truths put forward by Khrushchev in his ‘Secret Speech’. The
sheer number of major modifications to our common understanding of the
Stalin-era that are suggested by Furr is dizzying.

The beauty of Furr’s book, however, lies in the clarity of it’s
argument and the author’s rigorous attention to good historiography.
Every claim that Furr makes is backed up with primary or secondary
sources of real weight.  The book’s structure speaks volumes about the
intellectual integrity of its author: the first quarter of the book is
taken up with directly examining and countering the claims made by
Khrushchev, the second quarter is taken up by a wide-ranging
discussion of the historiography of the Stalin-era in general, while
the entire second half of the book is taken up with a mammoth appendix
documenting, and providing lengthy quotations from, Furr’s source
material. The appendix alone makes for fascinating reading. In it, we
find such nuggets as this comment in a letter from Stalin to
Shatunovsky:

“You speak of your ‘devotion’ to me. Perhaps this is a phrase that
came out accidentally. Perhaps… But if it not a chance phrase, I would
advise you to discard the ‘principle’ of devotion to persons. It is
not the Bolshevik way. Be devoted to the working class, its Party, its
state. That is a fine and useful thing. But do not confuse it with
devotion to persons, this vain and useless bauble of weak-minded
intellectuals.”

Or the documentary evidence of Stalin’s four attempts to resign his
position as General Secretary of the CPSU (1924, 1926, 1927, 1952), as
well as his attempt, in 1927, to abolish the position of General
Secretary all-together.  We can quote directly from the CC Plenum
transcript of this last occurrence:

“Yes, it seems that until the 11th Congress we did not have this
position [of General Secretary]. That was before Lenin stopped
working. If Lenin concluded that it was necessary to put forward the
question of founding the position of General Secretary, then I assume
he was prompted by the special circumstances that appeared with us
before the 10th Congress, when a more or less strong, well-organized
Opposition within the Party was founded. But now we no longer have
these conditions in the Party, because the Opposition is smashed to a
man. Therefore we could proceed to the abolition of this position.
Many people associate a conception of some kind of special rights of
the General Secretary with this position. I must say from my
experience, and comrades will confirm this, that there ought not to be
any special rights distinguishing the General Secretary from the
rights of other members of the secretariat.” [Emphasis added]

These are just two examples from what is a veritable goldmine of
source material.

It is, however, the section on historiography which, in many respects,
emerges as the most engaging. Furr’s sober approach to his subject
matter deserves to be widely read and imitated and his comments on
Soviet historiography are at least as persuasive as many of the
“standard” works on the subject.  A good example is his discussion of
“Torture and the Historical Problems Related To It”, a question which
any serious student of the Stalin-era cannot avoid:

“The fact that a defendant was tortured does not mean that defendant
was innocent. It is not evidence that the defendant was innocent. But
it is often erroneously assumed to be. […] Establishing the fact that
someone really has been tortured is not always easy. The mere fact
that someone claims he confessed because he was tortured is hardly
fool-proof. There are many reasons why people sometimes want to
retract a confession of guilt. Claiming one was tortured is a way of
doing this while preserving some dignity. So to be certain a person
was tortured there has to be further evidence of the fact, such as a
statement or confession by a person who actually did the torturing, or
a first-hand witness. When there is no evidence at all that a
defendant was tortured objective scholars have no business concluding
that he was tortured. This obvious point is often overlooked, probably
because a ‘paradigm’ that everybody was tortured, and everybody was
innocent, acts powerfully on the minds of both researchers and
readers.”

Another engaging aspect of Furr’s work is the possible conclusion that
it points towards, and it is this aspect that will probably most
interest those readers who are already convinced of the “innocence” of
Stalin. Traditionally, it has been assumed by anti-revisionists that
Khrushchev’s primary motivation in attacking Stalin was to lay the
groundwork for his pro-market economic reforms and his
counter-revolutionary modifications to Marxism-Leninism. Furr accepts
this as a likely primary motivation, but he adds to this another, more
disturbing, possible motivation

Furr returns to the right-Bukharinite conspiracy that was uncovered by
the Moscow Trials in the late 1930’s and notes the sheer number of
those convicted as part of that conspiracy by Stalin and Beria who
were “rehabilitated” (often posthumously) by Khrushchev following his
‘Secret Speech’. Among these are Ezhov, the man responsible for
hundreds of thousands of wrongful imprisonments and thousands of
wrongful executions as part of concerted campaign to “sow discontent”
amongst the Soviet people and lay the groundwork for a
counter-revolution; Zinoviev & Kamenev, both of whom were working with
Bukharin to aid the cause of hostile imperialist powers and remove the
leadership of the CPSU;  and Eikhe, the First Secretary who was deeply
involved in the illegitimate repressions of the Soviet people, and
many others. The chilling significance of this is best explained by
Furr himself:

“[Iuri] Zhukov has argued that it was the First Secretaries, led by
Robert Eikhe, who seem to have initiated the mass repressions
[uncovered and exposed by Beria and Stalin in the late 1930’s].
Khrushchev, one of these powerful First Secretaries, was himself very
heavily involved in large-scale repression, including the execution of
thousands of people. Many of these First Secretaries were themselves
later tried and executed. Some of them, like Kabakov, were accused of
being part of a conspiracy. Others, like Postyshev, were accused, at
least initially, of mass, unwarranted repression of Party members.
Eikhe also seems to fall into this group. Later many of these men were
also charged with being part of various conspiracies themselves.
Khrushchev was one of the few First Secretaries during the years
1937-1938 not only to escape such charges, but to have been promoted.

“Might it be that Khrushchev was part of such a conspiracy – but was
one of the highest-ranking members to have remained undetected? We
can’t prove or disprove this hypothesis. But it would explain all the
evidence we now have.”

The implications of such a possibility are, of course, massive. In
particular, if Khrushchev could be proven to be a part of the
right-Bukharinite conspiracy, it would have vital implications for our
understanding of the birth of revisionism in the Soviet Union. The
difficulty for anti-revisionists up till this point has been to
demonstrate how seemingly good communists could develop into enemies
of the proletariat. This new theory, while not removing the difficulty
entirely, would certainly tie it into more readily explicable
phenomena, such as the right deviation that overtook Bukharin and
others and led them to actively seek the overthrow of the Soviet
leadership. Clearly, this is a point which will demand further
examination.

If there is one major fault to be found in Furr’s work, it is his
final conclusion. In the very last page and a half of the book he
arrives at the somewhat dubious assertion that the rise of
Khrushchevite revisionism and the right-Bukharinite conspiracy is to
be explained by the faulty conception of socialism which Stalin
inherited from Lenin and Lenin in turn interpreted out of the works of
Marx and Engels. This is not a conclusion which he has hitherto been
building towards, nor is it one that he makes much, if any, sustained
attempt to support in the page and a half that he discusses it. It
feels a-priori, as if the author is trying to make his own personal
belief about Marxism-Leninism sit comfortably with the other
conclusions of his research in a way that it simply does not. To
Furr’s credit, he wisely ends on the words “that is a subject for
further research and a different book”, but nonetheless, one is left
wishing he had simply left his own personal feelings on
Marxism-Leninism for that “different book” and not tacked them,
sloppily, to the end of what is otherwise a fantastic work.

“Khrushchev Lied” is a fascinating new perspective on the history of
the Stalin-era. The wealth of new research alone is worth the cover
price, but the reader is also treated to an excellent discussion of
historiography and some tantilising possible conclusions. I would urge
anyone with any interest whatsoever in either Joseph Stalin or the
Soviet Union to read it, but also I feel certain that it will serve as
a new vital resource for the anti-revisionist movement in its fight
against the historical distortions perpetuated by the enemies of
Leninism.
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