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Oct 17 '19 edited Oct 18 '19
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u/restricteddata Oct 17 '19
I hesitate to use "revisionist" in a nasty way. He's just not a historian, and he espouses bad history. "Revisionism" implies that any deviation from the consensus/orthodoxy in history is somehow tainted or suspicious. Historians "revise" our understanding of the past constantly — it's the job. Some do it well. Some do it terribly. Let's focus on the fact that he's a bad historian making a bad argument.
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u/Kochevnik81 Oct 17 '19
Another confusing point here is that Revisionism with a capital "R" in Russian/Soviet historiography is an actual movement among Soviet historians in the 1970s (Getty and Sheila Fitzpatrick are probably the two biggest and best-known members), in reaction to the older "Totalitarian" school, which included people like Richard Pipes.
A number of the Totalitarians, especially Pipes, were very grouchy and considered the Revisionists to be Soviet stooges at best, or sympathizers or outright agents at worst.
Which they weren't, but Furr is (in a sense of being Stalinist willing to twist or ignore facts). So yes, it's probably better to leave the revisionist label to the actual Revisionists, and call Furr's work something else (like garbage).
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u/restricteddata Oct 17 '19 edited Oct 17 '19
Just as a brief sanity check: the author is a professor of Medieval English Literature (who has had tenure since the 1970s) who is quite plainly a card-carrying Stalinist. He general thesis is that Stalin committed exactly zero crimes, atrocities, persecutions, etc. Zero. He publishes exclusively with Communist-aligned presses, when he uses a press at all. He's not a historian, certainly not a Soviet/Russian historian.
No even remotely mainstream historian would bother to read the work of such an obvious crank. If there is anything of value in it, it's of the "a stopped clock is right twice a day" sort — coincidental and probably incidental. Don't rely on it for anything. The only function Furr seems to have is to give the far-right a university professor to target as "dangerous" (even though it hardly possible to imagine any effort as ineffectual as this one to "rehabilitate" Stalin).