There is not a single review of https://www.amazon.com/Fraud-Testament-Lenin-Grover-Furr/dp/0578284995 , in the JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=The+Fraud+of+the+%E2%80%9CTestament+of+Lenin%E2%80%9D&so=rel posted here https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31189 by Charlie. BTW, there are 363 results <https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=grover+furr&so=rel> @ JSTOR for Grover Furr.
Far better scholarship than Furr's can be found in texts such as , Reflections on Stalinism,"which can be downloaded <http://library.lol/main/898DC0959FB570A8819BD56F9F7E5ABF> via LibGen. Click the hyperlink labelled GET <https://download.library.lol/main/4327000/898dc0959fb570a8819bd56f9f7e5abf/%28NIU%20Series%20in%20Slavic%2C%20East%20European%2C%20and%20Eurasian%20Studies%29%20J.%20Arch%20Getty%2C%20Lewis%20H.%20Siegelbaum%20%28eds.%29%20-%20Reflections%20on%20Stalinism-Northern%20Illinois%20University%20Press%20%282024%29.pdf> . The chapter by William Chase, ,"Wrestling with Aspects of Interwar Stalinism," which focuses on Ivan N. Smirnov and Valentin Olberg, making a case that Trotsky lied about Olberg, and that there was indeed a plot to kill Stalin. "Olberg also testified that Sedov told him about Smirnov’s plan for organizing cadres and consolidating the Trotskyist movement in the USSR, creating conspiratorial organizations, urging Trotskyists who were party members to become double-dealers, and sending to the USSR, “mainly by illegal means,” supporters who could “prepare terrorist acts” against party leaders (RGASPI 17/171/220, 147–48, 149–54, 155–71). Olberg’s comrades from Berlin and Gorky also spoke of their plans and preparations to assassinate Stalin. Their statements implicated more than seventy people. On June 19, 1936, Iagoda sent Stalin a 174-page detailed memorandum on eighty-two people who he recommended be tried before the USSR’s Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and that those convicted should be shot. For each person, he provided biographical and political information, their confessions, the allegations against them, and who testified against them. He organized them into five groups; he assigned twenty-five of them to the Olberg group and ten to the Smirnov group. His grouping of people illustrates the important role that political networks or clans played in identifying real or potential threats. Eighty-one of them were subsequently executed (RGASPI 671/1/193, 1–174)." Page 108. *Reflections on Stalinism <http://library.lol/main/898DC0959FB570A8819BD56F9F7E5ABF>* Volume: Author(s): *J. Arch Getty, Lewis H. Siegelbaum (eds.)* Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Periodical: Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press City: Year: 2024 Customer Review Charles Loyola <https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AF6BU3WIYDW7MOTGBKCLN2Y6BHDQ/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8> *1.0 out of 5 stars* The fraud of Grover Furr <https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R27XUN0BYPMQSA/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0578284995> Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2022 Grover Furr, the prolific ultra-Stalinist pseudo-historian, has provided yet more grist for the mill of the "Stalin revival" happening in the interstices of the internet. His methodology is a curious revival of the High Stalinist "scholarship" of the 30s -taking quotations out of context, ignoring masses of evidence that run contrary to his conclusions, and worst of all flat out lies and non-sequiturs. His latest book is mostly a rehash of arguments by the Stalinist historian Valentin Sakharov, who published "Lenin's "Political Testament"" («Политическое завещание» Ленина) in 2003. Sakharov attempts to show that Lenin's so-called testament (a series of dictations he made while too paralyzed to write due to a stroke, which were made public by his partner Krupskaya after his death) is a forgery, and that moreover "The Question of Nationalities or "Autonomisation"" is a forgery as well. Sakharov (and thus Furr) does not provide any evidence that any particular person besides Lenin authored those texts, but implies that it was people allied with Trotsky. Since Krupskaya, Fotieva, Kamenev, Stalin, and others who maintained more or less close contact with Lenin in his final stroke-afflicted period do not fall into that category, and Trotksy and his allies were not in a position to forge a dictation by Lenin let alone convince Fotieva and Krupskaya (who made it public) to lie about who authored it (!!!), the Sakharov-Furr hypothesis is extremely unlikely to say the least. Now what are Sakharov's (and thus Furr's) arguments that the documents in question were NOT dictated by Lenin? This after all is what their books focus on. And they are very flimsy ones indeed: (1) the timestamps of diary entries by Lenin's secretaries contain some inconsistencies (so what??), and (2) the contested dictations like the Testament are critical of Stalin and his work (among other people), and therefore cannot be the work of Lenin. However, anyone who looks at the larger context of Lenin's break (both personal and political) from Stalin in his last period, and his moving closer to Trotsky (after their painful schism in the "Trade Union Debate") can plainly see that Sakharov's arguments that Lenin maintained his animosity towards Trotsky and warmth towards Stalin are bunk. Furr's method of argument has always been on the same superficial level, and here he just reproduces Sakharov’s arguments. Nobody in the Bolshevik Party - not even Stalin himself - raised any doubt whatsoever that Lenin's final dictations were genuine. But Stalinists today want to refute the fact that Lenin began to see Stalin for what he was towards the end of his (Lenin's) life - he saw that Stalin was using the Secretariat he headed, as well as the Orgburo and Rabkrin, to amass unlimited power in the Party. Lenin did not live to see the consequences of this power-hungry bureaucrat’s handiwork, which were becoming the future dictator of the Soviet Union and the Comintern, eliminating all traces of revolutionary politics, killing almost all Old Bolsheviks - and tens of thousands of revolutionaries who made the 1917 revolution, as well as revolutionaries of other countries, and thereby stalling the socialist movement for 100 years at the cost of many millions of lives. That is the true legacy of Stalin and Stalinism, and pseudo-historians like Furr are doing this movement a great disservice by lying to honest activists who want to fight for a better world. The piece noted by a Charles Loyola, fwiw, The Forgery of the 'Lenin Testament' https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv7n1/LenTest.htm Michael Pugliese -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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