I recently came across a so-called museum of communism online, with a board of directors including Grover Norquist, and a national anti-communist monument planned under Clinton. The website has a hall of heroes, but strangely enough, they left out such great anti-communists as Franco, Hitler, Syngman Rhee, Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, the Colombian AUC paramilitaries, Gulbuddin Hektmatyar, Osama bin Laden, and Luis Posada Carriles. They also left out Khrushchev, who damaged the communist cause on a global scale with his lies and social imperialist policies.
The website ends with Stalin in its list of Soviet villains, and no wonder, because under Stalin's leadership the USSR provided an attractive political and economic model to the international working class and had the diplomatic skill and economic and military might to protect the gains of the October Revolution and aid allied countries. Khrushchev's betrayal began the process of counterrevolution that ended with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, fractured the communist movement, and aided revisionists in taking control of most of the parties with state power.
Scholarship in the USA is dominated by anti-communists who accept nearly every allegation made by counterrevolutionaries from the former USSR, but a blow has been struck with the publication of Montclair State University professor Grover Furr's book Khrushchev Lied, first in Russia and now in the USA. It is time to challenge the anti-communists who control the history curriculum at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and the Durham Public Schools.
From the publisher, Erythros Press (www.erythrospress.com/store/furr.html):
Khrushchev Lied
The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False In his "Secret Speech" of February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev accused Joseph Stalin of immense crimes. Khrushchev's speech was a body blow from which the worldwide communist movement never recovered. It changed the course of history.
Grover Furr has spent a decade studying the flood of documents from formerly secret Soviet archives published since the end of the USSR. In this detailed study of Khrushchev's speech he reveals the astonishing results of his research: Not a single one of Khrushchev's "revelations" is true!
The most influential speech of the 20th century—if not of all time—a dishonest swindle? The very thought is monstrous; the implications for our understanding of Left history—immense. Basing their work on Khrushchev's lies, Soviet and Western historians, including Trotskyists and anticommunists, have effectively falsified Soviet history.
Virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong. The history of the USSR, and of the communist movement of the 20th century, must be completely rewritten.
Reviews and Comments on Khrushchev Lied "Khrushchev Lied is a marvelous piece of work, formidable in its research and reasoning, clear and precise in its writing, and breathtaking in its findings and implications. Revisiting old sources and using new material from the Soviet archives, Grover Furr's study demands a complete rethinking of Soviet history, socialist history, indeed world history of the 20th century."
- Roger Keeran, Empire State College, co-author of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Grover Furr has performed a valuable service to the field of Soviet studies by grappling in depth with Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956. … While some of the charges Khrushchev made have long been rejected in the West and in Russia, for example the idea that secret police chief Lavrenty Beria was a foreign agent, many other points Grover Furr raises are new and worthy of a great deal more attention."
- Robert W. Thurston, Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History, Miami University; author of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941.
"Grover Furr has written an intriguing book that challenges much of the existing historiography of the Stalinist 1930s. His insights and the sources he brings to bear question many of the views held by historians for decades and deserve our consideration. This book raises issues and questions that most scholars in the West today would not and does so in a sober and penetrating manner. He reaches fascinating conclusions, debunking much of what we thought we knew about the Stalinist era. … The translation of this pathbreaking work, which has already made quite a splash in Russia's academic circles, into English is long overdue."
- Jeff Jones, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; author of Everyday Life and the "Reconstruction" of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943-1948.
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