Permanently Deleted
Now that's funny. Anyone with a working frontal lobe should be able to conjure up memories of the Cold War, and perhaps recall how France, Britain, and the US dove in to assist the White Army post WWI; connecting the dots there, US foreign policy post WWII, god knows how many declassified docs about strangling out communism...
But nah, capitalism never wanted to harm communism ever, capitalism pure. The fact that capitalist states ALWAYS wanted to waste communist ones was just a coincidence, or the fault of communist ones for commiting some sort of vague crime
And that's extremely well known among anyone with even a passing academic interest in Cold War history. I remember it coming up in undergrad classes that you didn't even need any prerequisites to take.
We were taught about containment as the single driving force behind us foreign policy for most of the 20th century in high school
I would almost compare Parenti to Grover Furr in that both provide relatively unrepentant defenses of Stalin’s Soviet Union
Uhh, if this person believes that Parenti wasn't critical of the Soviet Union in Blackshirts And Reds, they obviously never read the book.
This looks like typical r*ddit-bro bullshit to me.
Ok, but calling Parenti an "unrepentant defender of Stalin's Soviet Union" is still bullshit.
If this person is reviewing Blackshirts and Reds as a work of academic history, then I actually don't think it's that unreasonable. However, Blackshirts and Reds isn't a work of academic history. It's for a popular audience and is meant to make people reconsider the propaganda "common knowledge" they've absorbed.
Didn't Stalin oppose Beria's appointment? I remember hearing that he just got outvoted on that one.
Furr is a well known fraud, and Chapo tends to associate with actual historians when they can.
Until he starts citing a single unauthenticated/corroborated document about a mole in the POUM during the spanish civil war somehow is major evidence in proving that Trotsky was a nazi collaborator.
“There’s no evidence that Trotsky was a nazi, which is evidence that Trotsky was a Nazi cuz Nazis are so good at hiding evidence”
this idea is rather ahistoric
eat my fucking shorts, this guy's an anticommunist ideologue . his counterevidence is "there was trade"? fuck off
On top of that, I see numerous flubs on post-Soviet states that don’t bode well: he discusses Estonia holding elections where 42 percent of the population was barred from voting because of being Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian. While the issue of non-citizenship for substantial numbers of people in Estonia and Latvia has rightly been an issue, this is an inflated number, as even in 1989 ethnic Estonians were over 61% of the population.
This is the worst Reddit-tier wankery I've ever read. Literally doesn't even address Parenti's point of Estonia being a social-fascist state, just dismisses it entirely because the figure was off by 3 percentage points.
r/askhistorians is populated almost entirely by undergrad "experts" who uncritically repeat the views of whatever the journal editors in their field deem to be acceptable views. As with everything else, you should take their views with the knowledge that they are informed by ideology and ensconced in a bourgeois intellectual environment that exists for the purpose of upholding the imperial state
yeah I get smug centrist undergrad vibes from that sub. I first noticed it in this post where the top comment literally avoids confronting the actual issue and just "both sides" the 2000 election controversy. Another person had to chime in that the guy above completely botched the answer, but it stayed up anyways.
The sub got more and more shitty the longer it existed. More and more people tried involved tried to do away with the materialist view on Anti Nazi speech and the result is a softening of the stance which doesn't shut down soap boxed questions.
The Anlgosphere bad.
It's a biased reddit response but fundamentally not inaccurate. Parenti basically got started doing good poli sci work, got tenure, then went off and started writing what are essentially pop history books but for a left audience. Lots of professors do that, but it's important to keep in mind they are not history. His Rome book especially he really doesn't know Roman historiography and basically just cites a couple outdated histories to craft a huge narrative, and his Yugoslavia book is just wrong. It's not history. His Tibet article that gets tossed around has similar problems. Take a work of soviet history like Getty or Moshe Lewin, who both pushed back hard against the totalitarian school led by Conquest (a school of soviet history which basically died in academia with the archive openings, most of them recanted and moved on with the field to the social historian school or left to pursue non academic ideological work like Conquest), a few pages of one of their works will contain perhaps a dozen citations, detail what the consensus view is in the field on that topic, and then carefully detail how and way they are moving away from it. This is the problem with constantly recommending Parenti to people as a work of history, it's just not doing the work that history needs to do. It's a polemic, one that I don't particularly agree with on a good few points, but okay to read if it is recognized for what it is. This is the problem when people take it as history, showing them the truth from lies they previously believed, it does some of that certainly, but it doesn't give you a picture of what the historical consensus, and what underlays that consensus, and what debates go on in that consensus (which has changed a lot even in the last 15 years) is.
On Furr, he's really weird, also not a historian. He often cites real documents but poorly translates them or fails to coherently analyze a set of documents (like this document says x, this says y contradicting x, what can be drawn from that) and draws conclusions from that make little sense off the evidence given, or he'll also cite unauthenticated/isolated documents and draw wild conclusions from them. He also does not engage at all with historians, even socialist ones. He'll also selectively cite a well known historian like Getty, and then take them out of context to support whatever is in the rest of his passage. J. Arch Getty once told Russian historian Sean Guillory (as said by Sean on this rebuttal to Furr and some other really bad history of the soviet union made on an episode of rev left radio) that "Furr actually knows the documents, he just draws strange conclusions from them".
For soviet history without digging in journals, one of the best sources is Sean's Russia Blog, which does interviews every week with Russian studies and soviet studies professors and PhD students on their work, often plugging new books or new dissertations coming out. They recently did a really good episode on the possibilities and limits that the USSR was for black radicals in the 1920s and 30s.
For a book on the period that I really like (even though some changes have happened since of course) is the soviet century by Moshe Lewin (who also did political history but is still in the social school). Moshe is also a really interesting historian as he lived in and fought (not sure if he saw combat or was just in officer training school) for the USSR during world War 2 yet became a historian in his 30s and continued historical work all the way up to his death in 2010. He fled nazis in 1941, became a collective farm worker and then a blast furnace operator, then enlisted in the soviet army. He was a treasure the soviet studies field and dearly mourned. He was in the social history school along with people like Getty and Fitzpatrick (which has now somewhat been replaced by the the cultural school, but the social school is not wrong in the way the old totalitarian one was).
Can you outline the "totalitarian", "social" and "cultural" schools for us?
Sure. The totalitarian school was a school of historians that couched everything done in the soviet union as part of a political theory of totalitarianism in a high modernist state ala Arendt (which was a misfire to begin with as her writing really only made sense for Nazi Germany). These historians were writing at the height of the cold war and had both ideology and lack of documents causing them to make poor decisions. They obsessively read all soviet propaganda, got hearsay accounts from defectors and one off survivors, etc. They tried to trace everything done into ideological boxes deriving from Lenin, Stalin, etc. and most egregiously Marx. This could not explain or accurately describe soviet policy, nor were they engaging well with the theoretical texts. In the best interpretation of these people, they didn't have anything else to go off of. This is Robert Conquest's school, and he's not read anymore because it's not accurate (and Conquest is not respected because he never owned up to his errors and changed his mind).
The social school was going on at the same time but less popular and it also had lack of sources. It tries to analyze the soviet union as social processes, mostly ignoring ideology. They tried to analyze soviet society as a society driven by material processes like any other. These people were often socialists like Moshe Lewin, or at least of the left. They had some trouble due to lack of sources and stats data you need to do this analysis before the archives opened, but were largely vindicated and grew to be dominant in the 1990s.
The cultural school is the newest. It tries to do material social analysis, but also seriously engage with ideology in a way the social school just kinda ignored. These are people like Slava Gerovitch, who wrote a really good book on soviet cybernetics, one that looks at material processes driving soviet science, but also seriously looks at the cultural/ideological shifts in how such processes were justified or changed to justify. So for instance seriously look at how Marx could one day be used to say cybernetics was bourgois, then be used to justify it the next, and the social processes happening in the science institutes at the same time. This school is sometimes called neo-totalitarian, not as a pejoritive, but to mean the reinsertion of looking at ideology (though now in a much more informed and rigorous way). Lars Lih, who wrote a really good book on the context of and new translation of What Is To Be Done is also broadly in this school for instance imo.
Should also say I am not a soviet history student, but took soviet history and history of socialism courses and participate in reading groups as a secondary interest during school.
Do you know of a good source I could cite re: Robert Conquest? I am currently debunking an article a friend sent me that cites him as an authoritative source.
For numbers stuff, the original Getty et al. analysis of NKVD archives on the purges is good. It's available here. There's also a Jacobin article that is an alright retrospective on him. There's also a new book out on the Kazakh famine (which has been criminally understudied in general), available here.
There's also this Askhistorians answer which is pretty good, however one thing is that a lot if it is informal sort of all soviet historians know this but don't write it down always kind of thing since the initial publications debunking him came out. Most social and cultural school books if they were written during the period when Conquest was still active will debunk him in an introduction to a chapter or snarkily do it in footnotes.
For a book on the period that I really like (even though some changes have happened since of course) is the soviet century by Moshe Lewin (who also did political history but is still in the social school).
Ayyy, I just bought that one. I was disappointed to learn that Moshe was a zionist, though.
Yeah he was a Labor Zionist, wanted Israel based in collective farms and urban working class Jews and Arabs. I'm not sure what his opinion on the Palestinian left and the conflict was exactly, there's a box of letters about it at UPenn, but don't know if they are scanned and online. He did join a group dedicated to having Israel be a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews, and not a Jewish nation state at least.
Eh, settler colonialism and supporting a genocidal project are still pretty yikes even if he had an idealistic image of it in his head. Would be good to be able to read what he thought about it afterwards, but regardless it really doesn't make up for fighting in the Israeli military.
He didn't fight for the Israeli military I think. The group I was referring to was a youth group in Lithuania. He emigrated to Israel in 1951 in his thirties, where he worked on a kibbutz, then as a journalist, then he went and became a historian.
Edit: I'm wrong probably, disregard the above. Looks like military service made him quit supporting zionism. He served during Sinai briefly.
Is this not accurate?
After working clandestinely in Paris to facilitate Jewish migration to Palestine, he emigrated to Israel in 1951. As he told the story, he was first shocked by Ariel Sharon’s raid into Jordan in 1953 that ended in a massacre in the village of Qibia; later, while serving in the Israeli army in the 1956 war with Egypt, Lewin concluded that his original Zionist ideals diverged too greatly from the actuality of the state of Israel. He turned to scholarship, first at Tel Aviv University, where he received his BA in 1961, and then at the Sorbonne, where he completed the doctoral thesis under Roger Portal that became his first book: La Paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique: 1928–1930 (1966).
Nope, I was wrong. Was not aware he was in the army in 56 for Sinai. There's no cite for it though but I think a personal friend probably wrote that obituary so I'd assume it's true.
I also found a quote hobsbawm delivered for his funeral from this obituary : "Since I am unable to come to his funeral, let me, as an old friend and constant admirer of Moshe Lewin, drop a metaphorical handful of earth on his grave from afar. Nobody has made fewer concessions to the intellectual fashions of the times. He recognized the absurdity of Russia even at its darkest moments, and nobody made better jokes about it. They were signs of an indestructible hope. Nobody has taught me more about understanding the USSR and post-Soviet Russia than he. I will miss the insight, the endless curiosity and the moral independence of this man. Farewell, Moshe"
My understanding is that the social school still can't fully explain things without diving into ideology. Like you can write about a social process, but those material forces are reinforced and also influenced by ideology. You can't get rid of it completely, so it needs to be dealt with. The social school didn't deal with it that much mainly because they were at first dedicated to disproving the totalitarians and social history in general started as a movement to remove ideology from historical analysis, but ultimately you can't completely ignore it so there's been a return to looking at it as the explanatory power of social history starts hitting walls.
It's also not a complete replacement like the totalitarians going away was, like social historians in many parts of history academia are still around and doing good work.
Yeah it seemed kinda weird to me that you said it replaced it, because these sound almost complimentary to me.
Well for one thing, Parenti is not and does not claim to be an academic historian. He's a political scientist, so calling it a political essay is fair and not actually a dunk on the work.
If you're doing professional work as an academic historian, yeah, no shit you're not going to use Blackshirts and Reds as a reference.
First, it’s notable that now Parenti only deals with penal system victims, as that neatly puts aside a great many victims of famine, collectivization and deportation.
The internal deportations were one thing (bad), but victims of collectivization? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? No, the mere act of handing ownership of farms from landlords to peasants did not kill people. And refering to "victims of famine" makes it clear that this guy is pushing the "Holodomor" narrative which is very much not the academic historical consensus. Even the answers in the r/askhistorians FAQ attest to this.
Second, he very selectively cites the Getty article (which overall is definitely in the historic consensus, although the article itself is pushing 30 years old at this point)
I.e., "yeah, he's right, but, uh, the article he cites is a few years older than the book".
but leaves out that Getty et al follow this up by describing how tens of thousands of inmates were summarily executed in the war years.
Heaven forbid the USSR executed tens of thousands of people during the war years. Not even being ironic: they didn't kill enough Nazis. There were more than a million of those pieces of shit left after the war, not even including the fascists everywhere else in Europe. They weren't thorough enough in their executions. But both the OP and Getty take for granted the liberal assumption that all killing is equally bad, even if the "victims" are fascists and fascist collaborators.
while failing to note Getty et al’s conclusions that “the use of capital punishment among the ‘measures of social defense’ sets Soviet penal practices apart from those of other systems” and that the detention system “had a political purpose and was used by the regime to silence real and imagined opponents”.
Yeah, you kind of do actually have to do that to defend a massive socialist country when basically the entire rest of the world is out to get you.
There is a larger issue with the idea of the Soviet Union and its satellite states failing because of a capitalist “siege” - this idea is rather ahistoric, and ignores numerous instances of major trade connections between the two blocs, such as Soviet joint agreements with many major Western firms the 1930s, US grain exports to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and major international loans to Eastern European countries in the 1970s.
Therefore, what, there was no aggression from the west against the Eastern Bloc? The fact that there was trade between the countries doesn't contradict Parenti's point; there was and continues to be all kinds of aggression including economic warfare constantly directed against socialist states.
I think you have some good points, just want to fill in some details.
The internal deportations were one thing (bad), but victims of collectivization? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? No, the mere act of handing ownership of farms from landlords to peasants did not kill people. And refering to “victims of famine” makes it clear that this guy is pushing the “Holodomor” narrative which is very much not the academic historical consensus. Even the answers in the r/askhistorians FAQ attest to this.
The kindest interpretation is they mean people who through the ineptitude of the policy died (which is the consensus). Some ways this happened included young party members ransacking small farms, and other misdeeds done during the forced process, or demanding more resources than the kolkhozes had. Real violent malice did occur and get into the popular consciousness of party members carrying out the collectivization which made it worse than it had to be (I'm reminded of a diary project from the late 90s of a historian who collected party member diaries from the Stalin period, one member was still alive, and when interviewed said that Gorbachev's ancestors were kulaks and that's why he destroyed the union, and the only mistake Stalin did make was not executing them all).
I.e., “yeah, he’s right, but, uh, the article he cites is a few years older than the book”.
The bigger implication here is that Parenti is misrepresenting Getty by selectively citing what he wants to, and then not dealing with how to resolve that contradiction (and is true).
Heaven forbid the USSR executed tens of thousands of people during the war years. Not even being ironic: they didn’t kill enough Nazis. There were more than a million of those pieces of shit left after the war, not even including the fascists everywhere else in Europe. They weren’t thorough enough in their executions. But both the OP and Getty take for granted the liberal assumption that all killing is equally bad, even if the “victims” are fascists and fascist collaborators.
The inmates referred to here are not ww2 prisoners I think, Getty et al had the NKVD data showing who was a POW, and their analysis stops in 1941 in the paper referenced. I also want to say that Parenti incredibly undersells the living conditions of the camps even for people in there for things like theft. The original paper by Getty et al. is a good read, available here for free, and shows how overblown the old estimates were but also does not discount the suffering and the mass chaos the party and society was in.
Yeah, you kind of do actually have to do that to defend a massive socialist country when basically the entire rest of the world is out to get you.
That's the thing, the world was out to get them, and with that they also let their paranoia go crazy. The party was tearing itself apart in the violence, member accusing member. So many good revolutionaries were shot for no reason other than what was effectively a top down directed mass panic, and significantly contributed to the dooming of the union.
Therefore, what, there was no aggression from the west against the Eastern Bloc? The fact that there was trade between the countries doesn’t contradict Parenti’s point; there was and continues to be all kinds of aggression including economic warfare constantly directed against socialist states.
This is true, but it's also more complicated and varied across different time periods. Relations during the 1930s were not especially destructive, while post ww2 to the 1970s were incredibly so, and then there was détente until 1980, Reagan's bullshit, and then the sudden collapse (which really was sudden, the US thought even if the cold war was over, the union would not dissolve)
The kindest interpretation is they mean people who through the ineptitude of the policy died (which is the consensus).
Among other factors, yeah, but describing them as victims alongside those who were internally deported and with no elaboration makes me assume they meant otherwise.
(I’m reminded of a diary project from the late 90s of a historian who collected party member diaries from the Stalin period, one member was still alive, and when interviewed said that Gorbachev’s ancestors were kulaks and that’s why he destroyed the union, and the only mistake Stalin did make was not executing them all).
lol I guess I can't blame him for feeling that way after everything that happened.
The bigger implication here is that Parenti is misrepresenting Getty by selectively citing what he wants to, and then not dealing with how to resolve that contradiction (and is true).
Just pointing out how the bit about the essay being old doesn't make any sense as a criticism when the book is nearly as old.
Although Parenti's broader point about the USSR being unfairly maligned as one giant concentration camp, that its oppressiveness was greatly exaggerated and its accomplishments all but ignored, still stand up even with the excesses of its prison system and its early agricultural failures considered. If the point is to moderate the common view of the USSR, without wholly denying that it had plenty of flaws (which Parenti freely admits), I don't really think it matters all that much that he only cited the conclusions from Getty that substantiate that, given that they aren't even wrong.
The inmates referred to here are not ww2 prisoners I think, Getty et al had the NKVD data showing who was a POW, and their analysis stops in 1941 in the paper referenced.
So were POWs or collaborators ever put in the Gulag?
This is true, but it’s also more complicated and varied across different time periods. Relations during the 1930s were not especially destructive, while post ww2 to the 1970s were incredibly so, and then there was détente until 1980, Reagan’s bullshit, and then the sudden collapse (which really was sudden, the US thought even if the cold war was over, the union would not dissolve)
Denying the existence of capitalist siege, or the role it played in the fall of socialism in the Eastern Bloc, however, still isn't true. The USSR was molded and constrained by these external pressures for its entire existence, same as every other socialist country, and no analysis of it and its decline can ignore that, which is what the OP is suggesting. And I highly doubt the US wasn't interfering with the USSR at all in the 30s and 70s, even if things were considerably cooler then - on the level of espionage, at the very least.
On the POWs, they were in camps called GUPVI, roughly Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees, not the GULAG. The executions referred to are GULAG executions made as soviet troops retreated and some camps were going to be left outside of soviet controlled territory.
I agree, don't mean to ignore it just note that the relationship is more complicated than capitalist pressure alone (and complicated ideologically to boot, just look at IIASA). The US was interfering at all times of course but the forms of interference were significantly different, and driven by different processes. The 30s for instance is a decade driven by the hope of selling huge industrial contracts to the USSR, and is in a world where the US and USSR were both not seen and did not conceive of themselves as principle world powers and antagonists (not that the USSR ever viewed the US in that way, it's complicated), and the USSRs comitern project is collapsing, it's internal paranoia is raging, all while the US is also in crisis and of course fascism.
Redditors really love the smell of their own farts
engaging with primary documents
Yes all political science writers should be working in archives...!? And yet when Grover Furr does this and uses evidence like memoirs, letters or private correspondance that was never meant to be published years after the Soviet union collapsed they dismiss it because "acktually communists lie all the time"
Also capitalist encirclement isnt a thing despite all the capitalists boasting about collapsing the soviet union and even saying "theyre not sorry for using jihadis against soviet union and starting the rise of islamic fundamentalism cos it collapsed ussr"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-jihadist-relations_b_5542757
Also capitalist encirclement isnt a thing despite all the capitalists boasting about collapsing the soviet union and even saying “theyre not sorry for using jihadis against soviet union and starting the rise of islamic fundamentalism cos it collapsed ussr”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-jihadist-relations_b_5542757
It's amazing the hoops you have to jump through to deny that the US stopped at absolutely nothing to try to destroy the USSR and socialism everywhere else for the entirety of its existence.
That being said,
And yet when Grover Furr does this and uses evidence like memoirs, letters or private correspondance that was never meant to be published years after the Soviet union collapsed they dismiss it because “acktually communists lie all the time”
I still think the letters Furr cites to justify specifically the executions of the old Bolsheviks were pretty sus. Like, "clearly confessions forced under torture" - not that that deligitmizes the Soviet project or even Stalin overall.
They were guilty though and torture says very little. You can be tortured and give a true confession in the same way you can be tortured and give a false confession
Their confessions spanned thousands of pages and they gave deep political reasons for how they got there
The trials themselves were open to the worlds press and ambassadors
Joseph Davies, US ambassador trained as a lawyer, gave a detailed breakdown at the time as to why the trials were legit and not frame ups as Trotsky was saying they were
We have an overwhelming amount of evidence now
The Tukhachevsky transcript was classified under Kruschev and only in 2018 released
After the grandson of one of the conspirators with Tukhachevsky read the transcript he came away convinced his grandfather was guilty
https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/07/15/the-moscow-trials-colonel-viktor-alksnis-read-the-tukhachevsky-transcript-and-came-away-convinced-he-was-guilty/
FinBol did an excellent video collating all the new evidence since the 1980s on the Moscow trials
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TBY_aDd5knE
Their confessions spanned thousands of pages and they gave deep political reasons for how they got there
That doesn't really change the context under which they were produced. Were they tortured or nah? Because people who are tortured tend to say whatever gets the torture to stop.
I have no doubt that at least some of the trials were legitimate and justified, like with the actual Trotskyists, but god, I remember looking into some of the early leaders of the various SSRs and like almost all of them were executed. It just strikes me as really unlikely that every single one of them was in on one big plot to destroy the USSR from within. That's not to say it wasn't necessarily true, but I would need to see some more analysis than just Furr's.
My position (and I still have a lot more reading to do; I just ordered [not on Amazon] a few more books on Soviet history that I'm waiting to read) more or less is that there were divisions within the party early on, with cynical opportunists and traitors but also a bunch of factions with different and often wrong albeit sincere beliefs about what direction to take the USSR in. Stalin and his supporters, I think, were right, but these purges weren't so much just an uprooting of corrupt elements of the party but also a lot of chaotic infighting between these different camps. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter all that much even if they were all arbitrarily murdered in the grand scheme of things, given how few of them there were relative to the whole population of the USSR that benefited so much from the revolution and the leadership that followed.
The Tukhachevsky transcript was classified under Kruschev and only in 2018 released
Can you hit me up with a link to the transcript? I couldn't find it in the article or FinBol's sources page.
That doesn’t really change the context under which they were produced. Were they tortured or nah? Because people who are tortured tend to say whatever gets the torture to stop.
Alexander Zinoviev (no relation to Grigory Zinoviev) was a political dissident in the USSR and was eventually exiled from the country. In 1939 he was accused of a plot to murder Stalin as part of an underground organization, but was eventually released.
He spoke of those years after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually admitting to his guilt.
“I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen …. The idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings …. We studied the ‘technical’ possibillities of an attack …. We even practiced. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn’t that a crime? When Stalin was still alive, I saw things differently… Until Stalin’s death I was anti-Stalinist” –Alexander Zinoviev (The remorse of a dissident: Alexander Zinoviev on Stalin and the dissolution of the USSR
Not only was he not tortured by the NKVD but was released due to lack of conclusive evidence despite him freely admitting his guilt
If you wish to believe that torture of these hardened men, who most of them had worked in the underground against the Tsar and suffered some form of abuse by Tsarist police, can be tortured in such a way they can be filmed in front of the worlds press and ambassadors (and therefore not have any debilitating signs of torture) detailing lengthy confessions admitting guilt to some crimes but innocence to others, spanning thousands of pages as to why they had come to the political position they had come to...
Surely you see we are entering 1950s "Communist brainwash" propaganda here.
The 1936 trial can be read here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro0000piat/page/n7/mode/2up
The 1938 one here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro000214mbp
Can you hit me up with a link to the transcript? I couldn’t find it in the article or FinBol’s sources page.
FinBol did that video before the release of the transcript (2017). I've yet to find it but have been trying to keep up with how i can access an english copy of it. This is what Colonel Alksnis (who got advance reading of the transcript in 2000 due to the fact he was the Grandson of one of the officers executed and that he was a colonel in the Russian army )
“My grandfather and Tukhachevsky were friends. And grandfather was on the judicial panel that judged both Tukhachevsky and Eideman. My interest in this case became even stronger after the well-known publications of procuror Viktorov, who wrote that Iakov Alksnis was very active at the trial, harrassed the accused. . . . But in the trial transcript everything was just the opposite. Grandfather only asked two or three questions during the entire trial. But the strangest thing is the behavior of the accused. Newspaper accounts claim that all the defendants denied their guilt completely. But according to the transcript they fully admitted their guilt. I realize that an admission of guilt itself can be the result of torture. But in the transcript it was something else entirely: a huge amount of detail, long dialogues, accusations of one another, a mass of precision. It’s simply impossible to stage-manage something like this. . . . I know nothing about the nature of the conspiracy. But of the fact that there really did exist a conspiracy within the Red Army and that Tukhachevsky participated in it I am completely convinced today.”
–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)
Judging by the materials of the case, the first interrogation took place only in January 1938. At the same time, judging by the 1956 rehabilitation materials filed in the same case, my grandfather was repeatedly summoned for interrogations and “beat out” evidence from him. But where are these protocols with “knocked out” testimonies, why were they not in the file?
After reviewing the transcript of the Tukhachevsky process, I realized that this process is also not so simple. My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.
I left the KGB building on Lubyanka in great dismay.
Firstly, I realized that my grandfather’s criminal case was “cleaned up” and some very important documents were removed from it. Obviously, these documents were seized during the Khrushchev thaw during the rehabilitation of the grandfather.
Secondly, there was still a “conspiracy of the military” in the Red Army.
https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/07/15/the-moscow-trials-colonel-viktor-alksnis-read-the-tukhachevsky-transcript-and-came-away-convinced-he-was-guilty/
I'll try to weigh in now I'm not shit hammered
When reading Parenti, you have to understand first and foremost that he is writing as a polemicist first and historian second. He is deliberately going against the mainstream grain as a first priority. As a result, he does play fast and loose with the facts and the sourcing.
But I wouldn't say he is BAD history. His extremely controversial book on Yugoslavia aside (which I never read) its very rare that he writes anything outright false. In fact the vast majority of what he outright asserts is TRUE...in broad strokes. His takes just largely lack nuance.
But there's a place for that kind of agitator, absolutely. The long and short for Parenti is read him, think about what he writes - but don't take him as gospel, don't cite him in an academic paper. Its on you to fill in the gaps of nuance that Parenti isn't concerned with (because his writing has its own priorities).
Blackshirts and Reds tl; dr: horseshoe theory is ignorant nonsense and this a book written at a time when it was very unpopular and professional suicide to say that. The book is introductory, popular literature and obviously not serious academic history.
Some comments here: he doesn't HAVE to be factual because he's writing an essay!!!
Fucking embarrassing but not surprising
