I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed. I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bullshit… Goebbels said that the Big Lie is successful and this is the Big Lie: that the Communists — that Stalin killed millions of people and that socialism is no good.
The full quote makes it pretty clear he’s refuting the double holocaust theory, and the context was a debate where his opponent claimed 100-150 million were killed by the communists.
The quote isn’t actually denying Stalin robbed trains in Tsarist Georgia, that the Bolsheviks shot the Romanov children, that the gulags were a pretty unpleasant place to be (although this too is greatly exaggerated), and his work fully acknowledges that the Bolsheviks were Leninists who saw violence as a tool for revolutionary political change.
You’re forming an opinion on Grove from a cherry-picked quote, taken out of context to intentionally misrepresent his actual views.
Look at his “purge” and “show trial” series for example. Grove is a serious historian and his presentation of facts is thorough and clear eyed.
His “crank” status is based on quote mining, and even then it’s really this one quote. Selectively just one half of one quote, that is.
If he was really a crank then they would be attacking his work instead of an cuff comment taken out of context, made while being harangued by some Black Book of Communism shit.
Plucking a sentence from the middle of a a fucking accurate comment like that doesn’t make him a crank, it makes his opponents hacks.
The full quote makes it pretty clear he’s refuting the double holocaust theory, and the context was a debate where his opponent claimed 100-150 million were killed by the communists.
The quote isn’t actually denying Stalin robbed trains in Tsarist Georgia, that the Bolsheviks shot the Romanov children, that the gulags were a pretty unpleasant place to be (although this too is greatly exaggerated), and his work fully acknowledges that the Bolsheviks were Leninists who saw violence as a tool for revolutionary political change.
You’re forming an opinion on Grove from a cherry-picked quote, taken out of context to intentionally misrepresent his actual views.
Look at his “purge” and “show trial” series for example. Grove is a serious historian and his presentation of facts is thorough and clear eyed.
https://espressostalinist.com/the-real-stalin-series/party-purges/
His “crank” status is based on quote mining, and even then it’s really this one quote. Selectively just one half of one quote, that is.
If he was really a crank then they would be attacking his work instead of an cuff comment taken out of context, made while being harangued by some Black Book of Communism shit.
Plucking a sentence from the middle of a a fucking accurate comment like that doesn’t make him a crank, it makes his opponents hacks.