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Furr contacted me privately to assure me that Timothy Snyder's book is utterly fictional and that NONE of his charges against Stalin are true. I wrote him back and asked about the underlying documents containing hundreds of admissions by various Soviet officials, that the Katyn massacres were organized by them and the whole thing approved by Stalin. These documents, first translated in English in this book are not some sort of mea culpas imagined after the fact but the actual paperwork that accompanied the massacres as they were decided upon and unfolded. Michael Meerpol's hazy recollection is accurate afaik. I recognize that Louis considers Snyder suspect and perhaps he is but that doesn't mean his book is bullshit through and through. I am not going to buy and read either Furr or Cienciala because that's what review literature is FOR. If Snyder, a bigshot professor at Yale, just idiotically quoted a fabricated book of hundreds of documents released by the Russian government, do you not think that someone in the academy would have noted and commented, if only to make some waves? The documentary book is Katyn, A Crime Without Punishment, Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
