Finally, during the period when it is fashionable to shoot zero on the Communists, the Resistance, on the history of the USSR, without even caring whether or not it is true what you said, a book written by 'distinguished Professor Domenico Losurdo, opens a starting point for reflection on the most controversial and demonized figure in the history of the labor movement: the revolutionary giorgiano Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili , better known as Stalin. A name that is synonymous with the gulag, tyranny, deportations: in short, a ruthless and bloody dictator, feared and loved in life as opposed and ridiculed after death.
Losurdo's book, trying to go beyond the banalities of propaganda, both historically reconstructs Stalin's the story that the image of the 'man of steel "in the course of history itself. Immediately after his death, in fact, true and admired mourning was general. So admired that the author said in a statement of Alcide De Gasperi (who had recognized the qualities of great military organization), not suspected of communist sympathies, who literally said: "When I see that while Hitler and Mussolini men persecuted for their race, and invented the appalling anti-Jewish legislation that we know, and I see both the Russians made up of 160 races try to merge these races overcoming the differences between Asia and the 'Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human society, let me say: this is a Christian, this is eminently universal in the sense of Catholicism "(p. 13). Admiration was shared by politicians such as Winston Churchill, Averell Harrimann (U.S. Ambassador to Moscow from 1945 to 46) and even by intellectuals such as Norberto Bobbio, Benedetto Croce and Hannah Arendt (who had changed radically its point of view).
This positive outlook, apologetics, suffers a reversal in a moment of history: the cold war, the speech made by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev February 25, 1956 at the XX Congress of the CPSU, the famous report, which painted Stalin as a bloody dictator, vain and mediocre from the intellectual point of view, a distorted picture of leadership that allowed the credit as "sole repository of revolutionary legitimacy" (p. 17). The allegations against the Secretary of the Communist propaganda was reinforced by his defeated rival and intellectuals that was heavily influenced by these, that Trotsky. All the blame on Stalin allowed also does not address some of the historical nodes, which certainly did not meet a strict reading of the texts and a cast of Marx and Lenin, as, for example, there were the strengthening of the rule instead of its extinction, the force of identity national (well analyzed by Stalin himself) states at the expense of a simplified view of internationalism: the reading interest of the Twentieth Congress allowed to shift all the contradictions at work in the infamous dictator disappeared. The book does justice to some ridiculous statements of anticommunist propaganda, brings the discussion on the historical level (complex grafting of the Revolution in the history of pre-Soviet Russia and the First World War) refutes some passages of the speech by Khrushchev and some legends about the early days of Operation Barbarossa (it is alleged that Stalin had almost withdrawn from their responsibilities because it personally affected by the treachery of the Germans, in fact, from documents and testimony show the exact opposite) . On the other tragedies, including the gulag and forced collectivization of the countryside by the creation of a massive industrial infrastructure, considering the climate of war and emergency since the beginning of the Soviet Revolution, from attempted coup, the invasion of white troops, is faced with the need to develop the nation even to be able to better defend against attacks. The same political struggle between Trotsky and other Bolsheviks waged against Stalin was not on the simple plan dialectical, but brought the country to the brink of civil war (ten years from October 1917 Trotsky was preparing a real coup): the trials, purges, terror, was it "justified" by Churchill and the Americans (think Ambassador Davies stated that the existence of conspiracies antistaliniani) and De Gasperi on the basis of information in their possession.
Other facts are discussed in the text, which places the story in the context of Russian history and the labor movement: it is not a revisionist book, it disappointed those who expected to find the denial of some sad episodes. It 's a difficult essay, written by a historian who compare these events to contemporary situations (there are also interesting pages on the history of Western colonialism and slavery, concentration camps and the massacres carried out by the predecessors of the apologists of the free market, pages history forgotten by the pundits of "democracy" as the extermination of the communists in Indonesia after Suharto's coup in 1965, backed by the Americans), which demolishes once and for all, the most infamous accusation against Stalin, to be more or less similar to Hitler and his Nazi regime.
You can also find news about the gulag that they jump off the chair, an analysis of the Ukrainian famine and is treated the Stalin's relationship with the Jews (is rebutted the accusation by many that the Secretary of the Communist Party was an anti-Semite): not least, also a series of questions posed by historians of the "right" (for example, French F. Furet) the link between violence and revolution (the Jacobins and the French Revolution of Thermidor), and certain aspects of Marxism itself.
The book closes with an essay by Canfora that makes some interesting observations on the fall of the USSR and the countries associated with it, an analysis that anyone who engages with the history of communism and its possible future revival can not be considered ( where it mentions a real betrayal of the last Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev ).
The text, for anyone who wanted to investigate the events in question, and comes with many notes at the bottom there is an extensive bibliography.
D. Losurdo, "Stalin. History and criticism of a black legend", Carocci Editore, Rome 2008.
Losurdo's book, trying to go beyond the banalities of propaganda, both historically reconstructs Stalin's the story that the image of the 'man of steel "in the course of history itself. Immediately after his death, in fact, true and admired mourning was general. So admired that the author said in a statement of Alcide De Gasperi (who had recognized the qualities of great military organization), not suspected of communist sympathies, who literally said: "When I see that while Hitler and Mussolini men persecuted for their race, and invented the appalling anti-Jewish legislation that we know, and I see both the Russians made up of 160 races try to merge these races overcoming the differences between Asia and the 'Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human society, let me say: this is a Christian, this is eminently universal in the sense of Catholicism "(p. 13). Admiration was shared by politicians such as Winston Churchill, Averell Harrimann (U.S. Ambassador to Moscow from 1945 to 46) and even by intellectuals such as Norberto Bobbio, Benedetto Croce and Hannah Arendt (who had changed radically its point of view).
This positive outlook, apologetics, suffers a reversal in a moment of history: the cold war, the speech made by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev February 25, 1956 at the XX Congress of the CPSU, the famous report, which painted Stalin as a bloody dictator, vain and mediocre from the intellectual point of view, a distorted picture of leadership that allowed the credit as "sole repository of revolutionary legitimacy" (p. 17). The allegations against the Secretary of the Communist propaganda was reinforced by his defeated rival and intellectuals that was heavily influenced by these, that Trotsky. All the blame on Stalin allowed also does not address some of the historical nodes, which certainly did not meet a strict reading of the texts and a cast of Marx and Lenin, as, for example, there were the strengthening of the rule instead of its extinction, the force of identity national (well analyzed by Stalin himself) states at the expense of a simplified view of internationalism: the reading interest of the Twentieth Congress allowed to shift all the contradictions at work in the infamous dictator disappeared. The book does justice to some ridiculous statements of anticommunist propaganda, brings the discussion on the historical level (complex grafting of the Revolution in the history of pre-Soviet Russia and the First World War) refutes some passages of the speech by Khrushchev and some legends about the early days of Operation Barbarossa (it is alleged that Stalin had almost withdrawn from their responsibilities because it personally affected by the treachery of the Germans, in fact, from documents and testimony show the exact opposite) . On the other tragedies, including the gulag and forced collectivization of the countryside by the creation of a massive industrial infrastructure, considering the climate of war and emergency since the beginning of the Soviet Revolution, from attempted coup, the invasion of white troops, is faced with the need to develop the nation even to be able to better defend against attacks. The same political struggle between Trotsky and other Bolsheviks waged against Stalin was not on the simple plan dialectical, but brought the country to the brink of civil war (ten years from October 1917 Trotsky was preparing a real coup): the trials, purges, terror, was it "justified" by Churchill and the Americans (think Ambassador Davies stated that the existence of conspiracies antistaliniani) and De Gasperi on the basis of information in their possession.
Other facts are discussed in the text, which places the story in the context of Russian history and the labor movement: it is not a revisionist book, it disappointed those who expected to find the denial of some sad episodes. It 's a difficult essay, written by a historian who compare these events to contemporary situations (there are also interesting pages on the history of Western colonialism and slavery, concentration camps and the massacres carried out by the predecessors of the apologists of the free market, pages history forgotten by the pundits of "democracy" as the extermination of the communists in Indonesia after Suharto's coup in 1965, backed by the Americans), which demolishes once and for all, the most infamous accusation against Stalin, to be more or less similar to Hitler and his Nazi regime.
You can also find news about the gulag that they jump off the chair, an analysis of the Ukrainian famine and is treated the Stalin's relationship with the Jews (is rebutted the accusation by many that the Secretary of the Communist Party was an anti-Semite): not least, also a series of questions posed by historians of the "right" (for example, French F. Furet) the link between violence and revolution (the Jacobins and the French Revolution of Thermidor), and certain aspects of Marxism itself.
The book closes with an essay by Canfora that makes some interesting observations on the fall of the USSR and the countries associated with it, an analysis that anyone who engages with the history of communism and its possible future revival can not be considered ( where it mentions a real betrayal of the last Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev ).
The text, for anyone who wanted to investigate the events in question, and comes with many notes at the bottom there is an extensive bibliography.
D. Losurdo, "Stalin. History and criticism of a black legend", Carocci Editore, Rome 2008.
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