SOVIET UNION

Editor’s Note: Russell Bentley, American expat and volunteer antifascist soldier in the struggle of Eastern Ukraine’s young republics of Donetsk and Lugansk against Kiev’s Nazi-infested, NATO-supported regime, has produced a moving video showing the people of Donetsk commemorating Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War. Simple and eloquent, the images say it all. I believe that decent people everywhere who understand these things, what WW2 meant to so many in terms of losses, pain and sacrifice,  will have a tough time holding back the tears. Paul Robeson’s singing is a most felicitous addition.—PG. 

During the first decades of the Soviet rule, excited artists and architects, both Russian and foreign, created many breathtaking concepts for new Soviet living. They typically reflected the grandeur of the Communist project. In a way, they shared an important quality with bold sexual fantasies: they were every inch as exciting as impractical, not least because the USSR lacked money and good engineers. Wise old man that he was, Stalin realized it right from the outset. Which is why in the 1930s, he ordered everyone to stop daydreaming. Our creative talents threw in their lot with the tested-and-tried from the past.

In this episode, we sat down with the man, the myth, the legend: Grover Furr himself. We chatted about his newest book, Stalin: Waiting for…the Truth, which is a clap-back at Stephen Kotkin’s dishonest biography “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler”. We also talked about Anti-communism in general, as well as the importance of Stalin’s legacy and why he isn’t, as many people accuse him of, a “Stalin apologist.” It’s spicy as hell, so buckle up.

GROVER FURR—Soviet leaders, Stalin among them, decided that the only solution was to reorganize agriculture on the basis of large factory-type farms like some in the American Midwest, which were deliberately adopted as models. When sovkhozy or “Soviet farms” appeared to work well the Soviet leadership made the decision to collectivize agriculture. Contrary to anticommunist propaganda, most peasants accepted collectivization. Resistance was modest; acts of outright rebellion rare. By 1932 Soviet agriculture, including in the Ukrainian SSR, was largely collectivized.

MICHAEL PARENTI’s classic analysis of the ovetrthrow of communism at the hands of Western economic, military and above all, propaganda assault, designed to exploit the weaknesses developed in the Soviet System.