STALIN: HISTORY AND CRITIQUE OF A BLACK LEGEND - DOMENICO LOSURDO

I’ve lately, for the past few years, been fascinated by the ways that Boomers are still obsessed with and fearful of Russia. On the one hand, you have to remember that they were the targets of one of the largest propaganda pushes of all time, the Cold War era anti-communism, a push that had many flavors and versions. There’s a right wing version where they’re an asiatic hoard of godless communists. There’s the compatible left version where it is a distortion of “real communism,” or “good leftism.” In both version they’re totalitarian, and seen as the moral equivalent of the Nazis, a sort of horseshoe theory argument that has had surprising staying power. Even today, if you talk to Boomers, especially ones that consider themselves progressive or liberals, they’ll talk about Russia like the communists are still in charge and engage in the most bird-brained conspiratorial thinking imaginable, seeing Russian control over all sorts of events. It’s sad and stupid, but it’s all down hill from this concerted effort that the West took to denigrate and diminish Bolshevism and especially Stalin. Losordo is here to challenge that and rescue Stalin and the CCCP more broadly from the “black legend” that has grown up around it. He starts with the obvious, that the Soviets defeated the Nazis. There is a consistent Western narrative that it was America that saved Europe and made it so the French aren’t “speaking German” as chuds love to say, but this quite simply isn’t true. The soviets fought the hardest and the longest and conquered Berlin. It’s not up to debate. He then takes on this idea that Hitler and Stalin are sort of demonic twins with somewhat different ideologies that really both amount to the dreaded “totalinatrism” a pretty useless term suited only for propaganda. Losurdo shows how Nazism and Hitler himself drew much more from America and American history to build their ideology. People will accuse current America of being the Fourth Reich but this term elides and switches the cause and effect, Nazi German didn’t inspire and shape current America, America inspired and shaped Nazi Germany. They were trying to be us. Hitler and co. were quite open about wanting to emulate America. They would speak of the Volga river as being their Mississippi, Liebesraum is their translation of Manifest Destiny, the concentration camps were actively modeled on NDN reservations, they sent legal scholars over the the united states to study Jim Crow laws and arrangements. The book does a good job putting a new spin on Stalin without making him into a hero beyond critique. Losurdo acknowledges issues and missteps and major problems. He does try to put them in context. Typically you hear about the show trials and gulags as results of pure evil. Stalin was evil, and he did monstrous evil things because it’s who he was and it’s how communism works. These are fairy tales, we can look seriously at what the conditions at the time were and see his actions in this context and critique them and learn from them. Losurdo focuses on the period of 1917-1945 calling it  a "Second Thirty Year's War.” In his telling, it is a war of a communist state besieged from the moment of its creation with Stalin and others working as hard as they can to preserve the soviet experiment.  There is no reason to resort to simple answers, he was a tough man in a very tough predicament who made some very tough choices. We can think about his choices without resorting to the Black Legend. I wish the book contained more straight information about Stalin and his life, it’s much more of an argument that deals with the conversation around Stalin rather than the bare facts of his life, but I suppose I should just read a typical biography for that. There are a lot of Boomers and leftists who need to read this.