Guerrilla History - Stalin: History & Critique of a Black Legend w/ Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro & David Peat

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Special, early access to an extended conversation about the imminent release of the new translation (by Henry and Salvatore) of Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend from Iskra Books.  The release of the book is imminent, and is available from the Iskra Books website, where it is currently linked at https://www.iskrabooks.org/copy-of-the-dark. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is Professor at the Geography Department of SUNY New Paltz and is chief editor for the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism.  His book Socialist States and the Environment is available from Pluto Press:  https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340418/socialist-states-and-the-environment/.  You can also find the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism for more invaluable anti-capitalist environmental perspectives: http://www.cnsjournal.org/. David Peat is one of the editorial board members at the Center for Communist Studies and their imprint Iskra Books.  You can follow him on twitter @dajveism. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You wouldn't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. a podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons

of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your usual co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, unfortunately not joined by either one of my co-hosts as they both had things come up at the last minute. So unfortunately, we will not be joined by Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University, or Brett O'Shea, who also, of course, is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host. of the Red Menace podcast. We're definitely going to miss them for the conversation, but we're hoping to get a very similar conversation to this

on Rev Left Radio with Brett in the mix as well very, very soon. So stay tuned for that, hopefully. I just want to remind the listeners before I introduce or have our guests introduce themselves and we talk about the topic, that you can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A- underscore pod, and you can help support the show and help us keep doing what we do by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A

history. Now, for today we have a really special topic, special for me at least, because it's a project that I was involved in and I'm really happy that my two biggest collaborators on this project are also here with me. So the topic is going to be the imminent release of a new translation of Domenico Lissorto's Stalin history and critique of a black legend, which is going to be coming out from Iskra Books on July 1st, co-translated and edited and with a forward by myself and my first guest, Salvatore Engel de Maure, my very dear friend. So, hello, Salvatore. How are you doing? Can you let the listeners know who you are? I think that many of them will remember the conversation we had with you about

socialist states and the environment, but for those who haven't listened for a while, who are you? Thank you very much for having me on. And it's an honest to be twice on the show. And I guess my name is already being stated. So I'm a geographer at the State University of New York at New Palt. And I'm editor of Capitalism, Nationer Socialism. And a journal called Human Geography.

I actually study soil contamination processes, but whenever I can, I'll do translation, I suppose. And perhaps I can just pass us on to David. Yeah, so our other guest is David Pete, who he was our main editor at the publisher, Iskra Books. So hello, David. It's really nice to actually meet you for the first time in kind of face-to-face format.

Can you let the listeners know who you are? Yeah, I've been a fan of the podcast for a long time, so it's really great to come on. And, yeah, I really enjoyed the previous episode with Talbotori. So, yeah, it's even extra special. But, yeah, my name's David. I'm on the editorial board of the Center for Communist Studies. And, yeah, you know, we have a publishing organization called Iskra Books,

who is publishing the Stalin book. And also we publish a journal, Peace Land and Breasteland, read. And generally we're an international group of organizers and academics who are trying to revive communist scholarship and also communist sort of art creations. So yeah, we look at, you know, publishing new works, new translations and kind of sharing all the things that are harder to access. And we have a strong, you know, ethic of making sure it's accessible for everyone. So we always put out like free copies alongside like really nice looking editions of texts. And yeah, we've been really enjoyed this project working alongside both of you.

Yeah, it was a pleasure working with both of you just to echo that point by David. And I do want to underscore one thing that David said before we get into the conversation, which is that this book is going to be available in really gorgeous paperback and hardcover editions, but also perhaps most importantly is a free PDF because we really want to make sure that this is accessible to as many people as possible. I know not everybody has the ability to utilize PDFs, But we're trying to make it as accessible as possible and making a free PDF form of this so that everybody can just access regardless of their ability to pay and their ability to access print books.

Anybody anywhere in the world will be able to get it for free. And I think that that's something really important and worth underscoring. So if you have any interest at all in this book, you'll be able to get that for free. Now, we're definitely going to be talking a lot about what's in the book, but I want to start off by talking about how this book came to be. So there's two questions that I want to throw out there. First one, I guess, for Salvatore and then maybe for the two of you. The first question would be, can you introduce who Domenico Les Sordo is for the listeners? I know that many of them are going to be familiar, at least with his name, if not his word.

but he does have many works that are quite popular as well, but who was he? I know that you and I, Salvatore, wrote a brief biography of his in the foreword for this Stalin book, but who is Domenico Lusorto? And then for both of you, just briefly, what is this book? Because I think that there's some misconceptions going around about what this book is. Maybe it's a biography of Stalin, which it is absolutely nothing. of the sort, that it's a hegiography of Stalin, which also absolutely not, or that, you know, it's trying to completely whitewash all of the issues that took place during the Stalin

government's time and power, which again, these are not things that were actually done in this work. So in the briefest sense, after we discuss who La Sordo is, what is this book? What can people be looking forward to? And then we'll discuss. some of the topics in it a little bit more deeply. So, I suppose for starters, yes. Domenico Sudo, who regressibly has passed away back in 2018, was a philosopher historian and someone who was also very involved in communist movements for an early age

and it was actually I think it took part of the Communist Party of Italy when it got re-established in 2016 a separate from Refundatione

Communist. Sorry, he's been actually immersing in politics in a very direct way not just as an academic Marxist and he's being considered a counter-current sort of Marxist. And of course, the book certainly will, in a lot of respects, for those who are not familiar

with the medical assault, though I think just the content of that book will convey that that he was certainly a counter-current, certainly in Italian politics as well, He has been in some quarters regarded as a controversial figure, but for the most part, I mean, he's been rather important in terms of rethinking a lot of things with respect to history of communist movements, not way beyond the book that we're going to be discussing. He, I think, was president of the Hegelian International Society. He's been involved in so many kinds of both non-academic and academic and academic associations is really one of the most amazing things about, about La Souda. He was a director of, I think, still to this day, an important association called Marx 21. And actually there you'll find a lot of bibliographical. material, but it's all in Italy as far as I've known.

This is one of the things that kind of struck me when becoming more acquainted with the sort of work, is that only a fraction of these books have been translated so far, and I thought it would have been many more. In fact, actually, due to my own ignorance, I didn't know it was that many. So I'm hoping that people will

we'll take the opportunity of, you know, hopefully having read the book, of being inquisitive enough to look at all his other works, at least those in English for those of the listeners who do not read Italian. A lot of a lot of the translations also being

in Spanish, Portuguese, French, so there are other languages one can look for. In any case, I suppose a brief introduction, perhaps and I should believe it at that, unless something else could be of interest but he has an incredibly

long pedigree beyond he's been in the papers interviewed by mainstream papers in Italy so he's a very important figure in broader terms oh and incidentally there are quite a few

of his lectures that are available on YouTube for those listeners who might be interested in watching. and if you can guess like simultaneous translation of course I don't think

there's any in English language as far as I'm aware but it'll be well worth viewing Dutch videos as well to get a good sense of the dynamism of Los Angeles and orator

anyway and as far as the book is concerned with the content I'd rather leave it to David to at least initiate that process if you don't mind I do want to add however what an incredible

pleasure it was and smooth the process was thanks to David and Henry to have this work finally translated properly. And then maybe we can go into those dynamics as well, but it's been one of the, I guess, the easiest projects, even though it was arduous in otherwise, but one of the easiest projects that have been my memory so far, thanks to you. Yeah, thanks, Alvatorre. I echo that, and it was really great to work on this, as you said,

quite, you know, a lot of, lot to do, but really enjoyable and great to collaborate with everybody. But yeah, as you said, like Lacerdo's texts, not many of them yet have been translated into English, and there are some more coming up, hopefully released this year by other publishers, which is fantastic, and hopefully there's the start of many new translations of his wider work, because it's all very useful. And yeah, as you say, with those other translations into Spanish and Portuguese, much wider range. And there have been previous attempts that kind of were like, you know, to translate this work. But they came from those sort of other languages, not directly from the Italian.

So it's, you know, it's great for us to try and bring it directly from Italian to English. And yeah, so this book has got kind of an infamy almost or a famousness online. It's almost got a kind of reputation of itself. for various reasons, some of which to do with, although there are some books translated into English, the publishers of those books kind of refused to publish this on what

we might contem as ideological grounds. I know Henry has what to say. We'll definitely talk about that. Yeah, but what is this book? It's not, as Henry says, it's not a biography. And actually within the book, he kind of criticizes the sort of criticizes the

attempt to, you know, psychopathologize and read someone's personal biography as doing history. And he sees the way that that is used to, you know, paint figures as evil incarnates and go even into their childhood and talk about how even from the, you know, the school days they were exhibiting these evil characters and they used that to build a whole kind of negative biography. And this is not a negative biography and it's not a positive biography. It kind of talks about Stalin, but it's more concerned with images of Stalin and how he has been constructed and how different images over time, contradictory images, you know, different decades have different images, and they've always been produced through intellectual work, and

equally other images have been destroyed and disseminated through various means. And that is more what the book, I would say, is concerned with. And yeah, you know, It's not, as Henry said, it's not a whitewashing project. It talks about things in Lassardo's particular methodology. In his liberalism book, he described his methodology as placing ideas and events in their concrete reality. And I think that's exactly what he does with this text. We weren't talking about Stalin himself, the Stalin administration and also the period of time. and, you know, going back into other revolutionary histories.

Yeah, I think that the thing that we can say that it's the closest to is a media and narrative analysis, a historiographic media and narrative analysis. When I say it's not a biography, it's not a biography at all. I mean, like there's almost zero biographical data about Stalin anywhere in this book. So I know that when I actually had first encountered that this book existed, I was under the notion that it was a biography because that was how it was presented to me. This is a couple of years ago. And I know many people still have this preconceived notion that this book is a biography. And I know that even more people hold this book to be hagiography or a whitewashing, a complete whitewashing, as we've mentioned a couple of times already.

and they'll use other scholars that are also accused of a whitewashing Stalin alongside this book. This book is nothing like those books. I can't tell you how many times with regards to actions by the Stalin administration, the words, and this is in Lacerdo's words, I understand that he's quoting many, many people. Actually, the majority of the people that he's quoting in this book are anti-Stalin scholars and anti-Stalin writers, which I'm sure that we'll talk about a bit later, who were using to form this analysis of the portrayals of Stalin.

But in Lacerdo's own words, I can't tell you how many times he uses the terms like the horror, the terror of these certain events. The point is that while accepting that there is horror and terror and given events, we have to frame this in an all-around comparative analysis, which is something that he puts forth in this. book, you have to look at, again, using historical materialism to look, where did a society come from? What are the factors that are exerting force on a society internally and externally in a given moment? What are other comparisons that we can make to existing states of that time

or other times? Using all of these methods to situate given actions, which again, I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more concretely in a little bit, but situating them in this all around comparative analysis, it allows you to be able to say that while there certainly was terror and horror in certain actions that were taken, and even Lassurdo is certainly not arguing with that. Like really, if I search through the document for the word horror and terror, I'm sure that there would be hundreds, many of them in quotes from other individuals, but many of them are also coming from Lesotho himself. The point is that if we're able to situate this properly within

the historical context, many of these actions, one, we can see that the narrative surrounding them is outright false. And in other times, the narrative, while there may be some horror or terror or whatever word that we're choosing at any given time for any given action, it doesn't necessarily compare, and in many cases, it is nowhere near as extreme as states that don't get the same criticism where the exact same actions are even more dangerous actions than this. Salvatore, I'm sorry for speaking so long right there. Do you have anything else that you want to briefly introduce about the book before? I want to talk a little bit about the genesis of this project. Oh, actually, thank you very much. You have something long at all.

I just wanted to just emphasize maybe the aspect of Rousseau's approach. So thank you, Henry, for making sure that it's clear that he was developing and he was developing throughout his life, a comparative framework of analysis, that is also based on historical materialism. And he himself professed to be a historian of ideas, you know, with a Marxist method to analyze. ideas and these include mythologies about characters like Stalin but

he's done that kind of work in other occasions as well in fact one of his magisterial work is about it's a critical appraisal of liberalism and there he also you can see the exposition of his methodology and it's quite an amazing work as well and for those who are not familiar

with that would be another it would be a great compliment to this book. Perhaps I wanted what I wanted to add that Losote is by no means the first who has engaged in a critical

revaluation of the ideas the ideologies the myths about Stalin as a figure and Stalinism in general concepts of which we might also want to discuss I'm not sure if there'll be enough time

but one might know of Ludo Mertrins the head of the I think the Belgian Labour Party for like a three decades a Maoist party who I think in the early 1990s did a kind of this similar exercise but it actually was about it was about the Stalin administration

per se. So that's actually closer, it wasn't a biography, but that would be closer to analyzing the actual government and state of things

in the Stalin administration and to recover from those experiences what is important for communist movements later on and the importance of what was accomplished. That was actually a controversial,

but I remember actually coming across it because of a friend of mine who pointed out to me. And at that time, I didn't appreciate it, and I was very dismissive. And it is actually due to what, I think both you, David, and every, and what you were saying about all the,

all the kinds of, purposeful misconceptualizations that have been promoted particularly on the left for a long time and I also wanted to add that Los Sudo's book

it was something that was controversial at the time within the Reform National Communista for example which he was part of at some point but a decade after, a bit more than a decade

after the Sulu's book on Saldon came out, I've learned later on, like more recently that a a Granshean and also a military

party member, I forget which party by the name of the name of the author is Ruggiero Jacomini has written a book that takes out part of Los Soudo's book

that we're discussing. And the book by Jacoveni that came out in 2019 is called it Prochese Stalin. I'm not sure whether it is translated yet, but it's focused on one of the aspects of Los Sude's book that wasn't

whose analysis was not carried out very fully and that is about the or as fully as it could have been because it was just basically one of the chapters. And that's who Shof's not so secret speech. So their entire book now very meticulously researched

is available at least cynically on that alone, taking apart that alleged, you know, secret of a speech, allegedly secret. And taking apart point by point, which was sort of wasn't really

too keen on doing because it had been done already in some respects, but this is actually, this is like, would be like the encyclopedia version of that. If anybody is interested, I'm not sure whether it's translated. So just to ask you a question about that Salvatore, because I'm not aware of that book. I don't know if it's translated and I haven't come across it. But what it sounds like is it

sounds like an even more comprehensive, as you said, encyclopedic reading similar to what Grover-Fer did in his Khrushav-Lied book. Is that what I'm understanding? from this? Yeah, exactly. Now, I'm not familiar with Grover's Hushab-Ly book. I've yet to read it. Shame on me for not having done so yet I should.

But I think this is, well, again, I'm not read first, so I wouldn't be able to say what the comparison could be. But this is based on documentary research that has come out, has come out since probably Grover's work as well. So in any case, it's something that is out there. I don't think it's being translated. And I'm sorry, to report that I do not know how different or similar the two works are.

Oh, that's okay. I was just asking out of my own curiosity. So that's a great question. And so hopefully we'll find out, you know. So what I want to do briefly now, since you've already brought it up, David, was the story of kind of the origin of this project that we undertook here and kind of why we undertook this project. So I guess just to orient the listeners briefly, as I had said previously, I was aware of this book for several years before kind of taking it on. but for the first year or two, I was still under the misconception that it was a biography, because again, that was how it was presented to me.

And since it wasn't widely available in English, I didn't have the ability to really check it out myself. I only came across the existing English edition, which I'll also mention briefly in just a second later, at which point I understood that this was not a biography. So I was under the misconception that this was a biography for a year or two. And then I started to understand a bit more, especially as I became acquainted with David Ferreira's translation into English, which was a freelance labor of love that the late David Ferreira undertook, utilizing the Portuguese and to some degree, also the Spanish translations of Stalin history and critique of a black legend, to be able to put something out there in English. And the reason that he did this is because the publishing house, which I will leave unnamed for now, but it's the same name for the left page of a book when you have a book open, the left-sided page. This publisher, which happens to share the same name with the, I believe it's from Latin, the Latin for the left-sided page when you have a book open, they had published several of Lasurdo's work.

before and actually had they had been quite successful in selling them and and even critical response to them was quite good. So now again, without naming the publisher, but it will be very easy to find out who I'm speaking about. This is the same publisher that published the liberalism book that both Salvatore and David had previously mentioned and all three of us I'm sure are recommending everybody check out because it is a magisterial work. But they've also published one or two other of his books now, and I know that they have another one. Yeah, I have the War and Revolution. I see David is holding up Lesotho's War and Revolution book.

I have that back at my parents' place in the U.S. And they have another book that, in theory, eventually will be released, but it has been postponed, I don't know how many times at this point. In any case, I email this publisher and ask them if they had any plans of releasing the Stalin book. knowing that they had, at least in principle, some agreements with the Lissordeaux estate to release English editions of these books. And the person who I emailed there was very courteous. You know, they were the email checker and they said, oh, great question. I'll forward it along to my managing editor and I'll let you know what they say about it.

At which point, I received a response from the managing editor, which was dismissive, aggressive, and outright insultary. I put this out on Twitter, and it was actually like my first viral tweet, just as a funny aside, you know, it's one thing to say, no, we're not going to be publishing it. It's another thing to, like, attack the person for sending in a pretty polite email asking if they were planning on doing it. So a year or two passes from that point. And our friend Ben, Ben Stanke, from the Center for Communist Studies, Iskra, Peaceland, but he said, well, Henry, why don't.

you just put together a new translation for it. And of course, I said, sure, not understanding how big of an undertaking that was going to be. I very quickly understood that I needed somebody to help me with the project. And so I contacted Salvatore to undertake the project with me. And as Salvatore said, for a project as kind of monumental as what we were trying to do, like translating and editing this incident. some ways very academic and also, you know, just complex book from Italian into English, it went really smoothly. So I can only say, you know, it was a pleasure working with a

Salvatore. And then when David came in and he made everything that we did look beautiful and, you know, had some really good feedback on things, you know, are you sure that you want to translate it this way? Is there anything that you want to change about this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on what this term means, we then were able to pull this project together, but really the genesis of this project, funnily enough, was because for ideological reasons, as David had previously mentioned, a publisher was just outright refusing to publish this book when many people were calling for it at that point. So that's just a brief, I guess not that brief at this point. Explanation of where the genesis of this project was.

it. I'm going to turn it over to you because I feel like you haven't spoken for a little bit now. Is there, where should we pick up in this conversation? So now we've kind of talked about like roughly what the book is, who Lassorto was, where did this project come from? And again, just a reminder for the listeners that this will be out on July 1st, which we're planning to release this episode just in advance of. And hopefully pre-orders will be available for it at that point. David, when we're looking at the content of this book or the process of this book, you want to go with that. I'm sure that we can talk about either. What's something that you want to raise early on in this conversation here? Yeah, just before talking about that, I thought it was

very interesting some of the things that the managing editors have said to you and the reasons that they gave for refusing to publish this book. They described that we will only, we will continue to publish books by Lucerdo that have intellectual merits and are based on real and serious research. So I thought that was really interesting when then, you know, when you look, the book that they have published, liberalism and counter-history, and you kind of compare the two books. And yeah, when you actually do read them side by side, it's clear that there's no methodological difference. In many cases, they use the same sources. In some cases, they even use the same quotations right, justify the same points. So it's a claim that one is lacking intellectual merit,

whereas another one that they do publish is not. It's just clearly not a logical argument. It's an ideological point that there's not, you know, they're refusing to publishes. it on the grounds that perhaps it has this reputation of being a whitewash of Stalin or something like that. Just one second, David. So just to drive one point home that you said, and then I'll let you continue. In the methodology of this book and the liberalism book are essentially the same. And if one is claiming that there is not intellectual merit in finding citations, they will be very

sadly mistaken when they look in the citation section, the references of this book, because there was a lot. And I can't, I know your job, David, of typesetting all of those citations must have been absolute hell because there is a mountain of citations from people who are favorable to Stalin to the most anti-Stalin people that you can possibly imagine. So just as an aside that like, even from that perspective, to claim that this doesn't have intellectual merit. but he happily publishes other things is really bizarre. Yeah, more than a thousand references. And yeah, I just thought it was kind of interesting

because I think to exceptionalize this book in the way that they have done, so it's kind of part of the same project that Lesotho is discussing, the kind of creation of an image of Stalin as, you know, beyond the pale, as completely untouchable as a subject for contextualization or historical placing. So I just thought it was kind of interesting that doing the process that is being discussed within the book itself.

And yeah, I just also wanted to kind of bring up, you know, the place then that where that sits in, you know, publishing in general. And, you know, when you go into in the UK, I don't know how it is in other countries, but if you go to a general bookshop in the UK and look at the Russian history section, obviously Now it is primarily texts about the, you know, the Russian Federation and the recent history and they're all, you know, pretty much of one character ideologically and that kind of a thing. But likewise, anything previous to that is all extremely biased and all extremely of one flavor. So, you know, to the importance of publishing and how important that is in terms of ideological reproduction. in the, you know, in the wider population. I just wanted to briefly mention it was in, you know, it was mentioned in a, I read a book called, what's it called?

But anyway, it's about the CIA, the director of the CIA in 1960s, mentioned how important publishing is as a propaganda tool and how they saw it as one of the most impactful ways to change people's opinion. and they said books are particularly interesting because they have the capacity to change one person's mind in a really strong way. That's much more impactful than any other form of propaganda. So they were very involved at the time in publishing different books.

And so, you know, we could make kind of jokes about, oh, it's so strange that they're refusing to publish this work. But you can see then within that how ideological formation project, you know, how important that is and why, you know, part of the reason I think we respond you know, to push this forward and get it out there and get it accessible to people as a kind of counter to that project. It's really well-stated in so many ways, in a conjuncture in which you have so much

very socialized negativity about socialism in general. I mean, to pass the opportunity to, at least for the education of socialist themselves to pass the opportunity of widening horizons with respect to historical experiences with respect to the formation of

anti-communist discourse in this case I mean it's really a shame it's it's doubly a shame from my perspective because there is a tendency, at least in some parts of the socialist left in North America, perhaps in the UK as well, I'm not sure, but to underestimate or perhaps not even think about the

location of the work that we do whether it's academic or not within a wider context and let me, I just have this experience I'm not

I'm hoping it's not going to be seen as irrelevant but I mean just to So, I was teaching just the other day, and I was teaching about the history of fascism, which is something that I've researched for a long time now. And, of course, now it's becoming of greater interest for reasons that hopefully are obvious because of this recent Italian government. But one of the students asked a very simple question about what is the difference between fascism and socialism. And the way

the issue puts it was it's confusing out there to know, you know, what the difference is, getting so many conflicting views. It's that kind of situation, I think, that we really must bear in mind when publishing on the left.

We have to understand this wider context. Otherwise, it's very easy to play right into the hands of liberalism of pro-capitalist forces. So it's that level of basically maybe lack of self-awareness.

I'm not sure what it is. There seems to pervade some parts of the left. I'm not sure whether they're trying maybe in a cocoon. It's certainly not helpful. So it's not helpful for two things, right? It's not helpful in terms of

countering the barrage of pro-capitalist propaganda out there, anti-communist propaganda that surrounds us, particularly in core capitalist countries. and then on the other hand it also prevents the further education of ourselves intergenerational

I mean how are we going to be able to suss out what's actually happened if we can't even counter mythologies about our own movies so hence this also will convince me immediately to to train out as much as I could

when Henry asked I hadn't in there to see twice of course, for those reasons alone. And just to add that, of course, one of the reasons I reached out to Salvatore, in addition to the fact that he's a native Italian speaker, is that he's also just one of my favorite people. So it's worth bearing that in mind. So it was a pleasure working with you on that regard as well.

I want to just throw out one thing out there, which ties into something that's hit within the book pretty heavily. Salvatore, you mentioned that the student comes to you saying, what's the difference between socialism and fascism? And this is something that we hear shockingly often, but this is something that is often presented to us by liberals and conservatives as like a very obvious thing. Oh, sure, there may be some differences between socialism and fascism, but it's a razor's edge between them. They're really monstrous twin pillars. And I guess that that's where I'm going to be going with this next question,

which is that one of the things that's analyzed in this book is the tendency. And it's something that, again, we see super frequently the construction of monstrous twin pillars of Stalin and Hitler, which echoes this constructing of twin pillars between socialism and fascism, a willful construction that obfuscates reality is not related to reality and goes out of its way. to avoid very obvious explanations that would dispel this. But they construct this reality in which they say socialism and fascism are adjacent to one another or related to one another. And this is tied in directly in many cases to constructing these monstrous twin pillars that Lesordeaux talks about in the book. And that we see almost every day those of us who ever mention the word Stalin in anything but a condemnatory fashion. that, you know, Stalin and Hitler were essentially the same. They did some things different, maybe domestically, but essentially they're the same. Again, it's just razor's edge between

the pillars. So I'm wondering if we can discuss. And David and Salvatore, both of you, feel free to contribute to this, you know, how these monstrous twin pillars are constructed, the false narratives that are used. Lassardo provides some examples in the book, but actually I think he could have provided a lot more than he did. But I actually could say that about many of these sections, this book should be about 600 pages long rather than the like 380 that it is, although translating it would have just been that much harder.

But anyway, go ahead. I mean, I found that to be, you know, it echoes, it echoes this construction of these twin pillars. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And yeah, he just bring up a few examples and we're out of the beginning of the book. I like the, and it comes through a few times, the description of Stalin is a huge, grim, whimsical, morbid, morbid human monster. And these kinds of, it's useful description because it's kind of describes and shows the kind of contradictory character of the construction of these figures. And later in the book, the sort of mentions how after a certain points

of time, well, primarily after Grushchev's, you know, after the usefulness of this caricature fell away, fell away, they started applying it to all sorts of other different figures for better or worse. But yeah, you know, it's kind of the Schrodinger's Stalin, in which case he is the supreme evil,

but also a complete buffoon. And yeah, all of these, you know, he can't do anything right, but he's also the most dangerous figure in all of human history. So these kinds of figures, And we see it applied to people in the modern world like, you know, the leaders of the DPRK and all that kind of a thing. So, yeah, it's, I think it, this constructing it in this kind of way is very ideologically useful because it then becomes like an empty signifier and it can be used in any sense to, um, to attack the left primarily because that's, it's being used in an anti-communist sense. And we see this in, in British politics, you wouldn't be, you'd be surprised to know how often. accusations of starlism get thrown around for the mildest of social democratic reforms and

that kind of thing. And Lassardo mentions that, you know, if, you know, we seed the ground of allowing these kinds of things to go on challenge, then the people who do these constructions will just go further and further and further and then they go back to, you know, Marx becomes a figure of ultimate evil and social democracy and any kind of, you know, mass movements become these evil things. So it just shows that it is important to resist these hegemenic narratives because otherwise they have incredibly useful to be weaponized by the enemies of people's movements. Yeah, it's right.

I mean, it makes it even more important, I guess from a Granchion perspective. It makes sense to someone like Juliozegovina was involved in the Granchi society would take this up as well. It is so important, this ideological. struggle and is precisely for the reasons you already illustrated David and Henry as well something that you were reminding me of as well with respect to the internal conflicts within communist movements and between that it seems like I'm not talking about just

sectarian movements and stuff like that, but like when Eurocommunism sort of came about in the 70s you know it could have gone in different directions but one of the things that, yes, I'd be some of the

intellectuals were doing and also in the UK is exactly the this kind of facile reliance on this on this Stalin as a figure to bludgeon any sort of dissent or any sort of resistance to certain aspects of Eurocommunism or Eurocommunism in total.

That's something that I kind of vaguely remember from the 80s and the 90s even. By that time, I guess it wasn't, it was irrelevant Eurocommunism. but it's just there really needs to be a lot more, or I'm not sure how to really understand this, whether it's ingenuousness on the part of people who are using the discourse from liberals and conservatives in the capitalist world, if it's ingenuous on their part,

if they're really unaware of the consequences of their actions, or whether they really cannot, I mean, politically cannot really tell the difference between liberalism and fascism, frankly. As, you know, liberalism has been really the one that is the, shall we say, to take up M.A. Caesar, fascism is liberalism, I mean, to kind of paraphrase it, you know, a different way. and maybe add some meaning to it, but fascism is liberalism being applied to Europe, you know, because liberalism is the other side of the everyday fascism in the colonies. So it seems to me that one of the efforts that really should be made

instead of this reproduction and reinforcement of this discourse on Stalin as all those nasty kinds of aspects of the, yeah, the actually existing difficulties and horrors that did happen. But instead of going that route of instead, like, focusing their efforts on showing, just like Osolgo does in some respects. And I want to add, actually, someone like Gerald Hall, who's been writing since the 80s, has been doing a wonderful, fantastic work on. that as well is to really demonstrate that what is really closest to fascism is liberalism,

is liberal democracy, because liberal democracy is based on fascism for the rest of the world. So it is peculiar that the left still doesn't get this. I really don't, I don't know whether it's ingenuousness or it's privileges in the societies where they live and they just don't get it. But even in the U.S., it seems so straightforward. You've got reservations. You've got people ghettoized, especially if there are people that call that. That is liberalism. That didn't happen with USSR.

They didn't happen under Stalin. So that's the curiosity. Yeah, a couple things that I want to throw out there. So the first is actually a quote that Lesordeaux utilizes in the introduction of the book. And funny enough, I had seen David had tweeted this quote out, I believe, was it yesterday, I think, maybe the day before. And I had this exact same quote saved in my photos on my phone so that I could utilize it in exactly the same way that David did. So he beat me to the punch on this one.

I will give him credit for that. But I think that this quote relates to this construction of these twin pillars. And Salvatore, you said, you know, you don't know whether it's willful ignorance or whether it's, you know, something that's fed to them and they're completely. propagandized or whether it's malicious in some ways. This is what Thomas Mann had to say about this phenomenon. To place Russian communism and Nazi fascism on the same moral plane and that both would be totalitarian is superficial at best, fascism at worst. Whoever insists on this equation may well consider himself a Democrat in truth and in the

bottom of his heart, he is in fact already a fascist and certainly only in a hypocritical and insincere way will he fight fascism while reserving all of his hatred for communism. I found that quote to be excellent. So I just wanted to make sure that we got that on tape here. But one of the things that David was highlighting is also particularly interesting and I think relates to many of the kind of myths that are constructed about Stalin is that he's somehow simultaneously a buffoon and like this cold calculating monster. You know, at the same time, he never has any idea of what's going on. And at the other hand, he's like completely all powerful and all controlling and, you know,

constructing this concentrationary universe, which Salvatore, I'll have you explain what that is in a little bit. I have a couple terms that I want you to explain for the audience that I think will be really useful for them. Don't worry, you've already explained them for the editor's notes. I'm sure that your explanations will be better than what we can do. But one of the things that I'm just going to use to highlight this point on how this narrative of both being a buffoon and a monster is utilized in a very, like, obviously false way. And this is not to talk about the gulags or anything like that, which again, Lassurdo, I will mention almost every time the word gulag comes up, he says the terror or horror. or something of that, of the gulags. This is actually not where I wanted to go originally,

but I'm just seeing this book next to me. Sakhilin Island by Anton Chekhov, which is a great read, by the way, for people who are unaware of it. It was written in 1890 by Chekhov, the great playwrights of Russia, pre-revolutionary Russia. When he was 30, he had tuberculosis,

and he wanted to check out the penal colonies on Sakhalin Island, which for those of you who are unaware of where Sakhalin Island is, it's an island to the north of Japan. David has a map of Japan behind him, and you can see Sakalin Island on that. That's how far to the east it is. Remember, Russia has 11 time zones. It's the one to the far, far, far east, like way off the east. It's east of China.

That's how far to the east it is. And Chekhov was based in Moscow, and he had tuberculosis at the, the time and he figured, ah, what would be better than an 11 month, sorry, an 11 week long journey across the entirety of Russia to get to Sahelan Island, this desolate penal colony to do some like actuarial analysis of what was going on in the penal colonies. And the treatment there was absolutely appalling. This is during the Tsarist regime. And yeah, so that's a recommendation for me is that, you know, check out this book. It's like half travelogue, you know, about the journey to get there and then half these actuarial tables and statements from people who are living

in or around these penal colonies. It's a really fascinating work, but it goes to show that, again, utilizing an analysis that takes into account what was present in a society before a given event, as well as the external pressures that were operating during a given event and other comparative analyses with what was going on in other places. like, you know, internment camps or just the fact that, you know, the U.S. is the biggest prison population in the world by far. It's the biggest prison population in world history. That's something that we have to keep in mind. But with regards to the buffoon and monster point, I'm sorry for going on so long. I promise I'll let you go on just as long, each of you.

Is this notion that's put forth and I had come across this, again, on Twitter, like within the last two days that for weeks after Operation Barbarossa started and Germany started to invade the Soviet Union, Stalin was so like shell-shocked that he just didn't do anything. He like hit himself away and basically disappeared and all of the decisions that were being made were being made by random people who didn't really have any authority a grasp of it. And that was why the Germans were so successful in the early part of the invasion. And this one does not square with reality. There's no historical basis for that claim. And there's a lot of historical, you know, documented evidence to show that actually the opposite was true, that Stalin was very intimately involved with all

of these things. And Lucerto does cover some of this evidence in his book. But again, this is another place where there's a lot more evidence that goes uncovered because this book would really expand. But I wanted to go through just one example of something that was done. that goes to show that these decisions, these like major undertakings were happening in the very earliest days. And it's a local example for me. So for listeners who are unaware, I live in the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia, in the city of Kazan, which by the way is the greatest city in the world, and you should all visit when it is possible for you to do so. But at the time of the beginning of the Second World War, or as it's called here, the Great Patriotic War,

This was not exactly like the cutting edge of Russia. It had very fertile farm fields and it did have some industry operating here. But, you know, it's got a population of at the time about 2.8 million. Well, the war breaks out. And of course, most of the industries that are essential for maintaining a war effort are located on the border, the western border. So as the Germans are advancing, if those industries and the production facilities for those critical war components are captured. I mean, there goes the entire war effort right there. You might as well just capitulate. Very quickly, it was decided that they would ship these entire production

facilities out east. So just for a bit of geography, Tutterstan is like a 12-hour drive due east of Moscow. So you'd have to be like driving highway speed for 12 hours straight to the east of Moscow to get here. And this is like the western parts of where they were relocating things. They were relocating things way into the Asian part of Russia. But there's so much that was done. In such a small period of time, they relocated a plant to Tudderstan. And again, I'm just using this because it has local significance to me for ammunition, weapons, equipment, even cultural heritage. Some film archives were relocated to Kazan during the war. The Academies of Sciences for the USSR, I think, had 12 branches.

I have them written down, but I don't think that we need to list them. But like 12 branches of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were relocated to Kazan during the war. Seventy major industrial enterprises from the frontline area were relocated to this Republic alone. And overall, in just the second half of 1941, 2.5,000 industrial enterprises were exported eastwards relocated to the east a few that were relocated to this city specifically just because it's interesting Moscow Aviation was of course

based in Moscow it was then moved to Kazan Leningrad Aviation was based in St. Petersburg again moved to Tatarstan Leningrad metalworking moved to Tudorstan Moscow the second Moscow watch factory which interestingly is the manufacturer of the

that I'm wearing right now. I have a few more from them. They're now called Bostock, which means East and Russian. The Dental Hog production factory of Kiev, glass factories from Leningrad and Ural, tobacco factories, which, by the way, Stalin claimed was absolutely essential for the front line. This is something that Lacerdo mentioned in his book. They needed their tobacco, et cetera, et cetera. There's, again, I have a whole list of these. But the point is, is that just in the case of, I want to use this watch company as a case in point, because it's really a funny story. This watch company had not been existing for very long in Moscow at the time that the war broke out. And what they did was

actually disassemble the entire plant, all of the useful components on it. They shipped it east by train, and then they put it on barges, floated it down the river, at which point it was getting to be the winter of 1941 and it froze in the river. So they had all of the equipment like frozen on these barges close to the final destination here in Tatarstan. And when they were finally able to like chip through the ice in the spring and move the plant there, almost immediately they had the whole thing up and running making on pocket watches and things like that. But timed detonation devices for timed explosives and tank timing equipment. like critical, very critical things.

They increased production by two and a half times of all of these critical things. If you look across all of these different things that they were trying to produce, this Republic alone made more than 600 types of weapon, ammunition, and equipment for the front. Again, this is not like a super huge area. I'm just trying to drive that point home. And this was all done almost overnight. They understood that they needed to do this. The decision was made and they implemented it very quickly.

quickly and just as my last point on this to demonstrate that again this is not some buffoon who's flailing around this is like a very calculated thing these sorts of things don't come around very quickly i had just seen a news article about new york city uh wanting to implement uh handicap accessibility to their subway system at all of their subway ports so like you know these kind of ramps and things uh for people in wheelchairs uh easier escalator access and other sorts of accessibility for disabled people. And they said it was one of their top priorities. And if I remember correctly, they said that best case scenario, they would be able to finish

it. I want to say it was like 13 years or something like that, which is a crazy time if this is one of your top priorities. We're talking in a matter of weeks or months. They're disassembling, shipping across an area that's just obscenely huge, reassembling, converting the production to different types of different types of things. Sorry, one last thing. The Kazan Film Factory, I find this one really interesting.

The Kazan Film Factory, named after Shishkin, was making, of course, film for taking videos and pictures. Immediately after the war began, they almost overnight converted production to producing aviation film for doing spy aerial photography. of enemy military facilities. Like overnight, they just decided, hey, this is what we're doing, and that's what they did. And they were one of the leading producers for that,

something that is absolutely critical for a war effort. I mean, does this sound like the actions of somebody who's a buffoon and is flailing around and, like, hiding somewhere, and nobody's hearing from him? These were all carried out directly at the behest of the administration. Stalin himself was working 14 to 16 hours a day, as is well documented by the historical record. So, yeah, that's my very overly long anecdote, which actually, I mean, I have 19 pages of notes about this, but I'll spare you the rest.

It's a very interesting story. And this is just in like, again, Tudorstan now has four million people in the entire republic. So, yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on that, Henry, and say like, because Lassaudo mentions that one of the methods that are used to destroy. draw or rather to create a new image of Stalin is to attack him on basically all of his what were previously considered or generally regarded, you know, even outside of the USSR as kind of his strong points. So you mentioned about, you know, his military skill and that becomes the story of him being completely surprised and shocked and then unable to act and he goes into a

depression and hides in his dacha for a day or so while the, you know, Barbarossa. is rolling across various borders. But equally, you know, as we thought a little bit about earlier, they attack his, you know, they partly blame that military failure on his unwillingness to fight fascism because of, as you were talking about earlier, they equate, you know, communism and fascism. So he wasn't really motivated to fight fascism

because in his heart, of course, he was really a fascist. But equally, his other points at which he was regarded, you know, across the world is his concept of the national problem and support for minority populations within the USSR and the wider world, the support of, you know, national liberation. He is seen as someone who brutally suppressed, you know, all of the peoples of the USSR, even though, you know, people often don't even note that he was from a minority group himself. And then even so, like the industrial legacy and his incredible, you know, the not only him, the entire Soviet population, you know, from almost from nothing, because they were incredibly, you know, very small literacy levels, almost no industrialization at the time of the revolution. And in such a short period of time, they, you know, they built a country out of almost nothing to one of the superpowers of the world.

And then in now an hour legacy, and I'm sure Salvatore, could talk a little bit more about this, is, you know, that's just seen as incredibly environmentally destructive, and that is completely ignored. So it's inverted in that way and becomes a negative characteristic of Stalin, and that's what they used. They flipped all of his positive achievements into these negative characteristics. Yeah, certainly. with respect to environmental well I better not stuff there's just

there'll be too much to say about it but it's exactly as you say it's it's the making the world upside down and without a certain of evidence to actually demonstrate it

so a lot of it should be and I mean it should be surprising that any self-respecting Marxists would not be able to see through that and contribute to counter such, well, really both face lying, I mean, because I was just like his statements that I may without any supporting evidence.

So with respect to environmental issues, I mean, if people want to ignore all the major feats done in reforestation, you know, that's, I guess, their problem. But if we're going to be learning anything as socialists or communist, you know, that's something that we should draw from in terms of what can be done in terms of mobilizing people to achieve ecologically constructive things. Salvatore, just briefly, can you, you mentioned aforestation. This is something that we talked about in our previous conversation with you, but for listeners who haven't listened to that, can you talk about the achievements of the aforestation program? Because it is never discussed.

It's amazing. You're right. You know, it's actually not me at all who has done the research. I'm relying on someone by the name of Brain. I can't remember his first name. It's done an entire book. Is it Stephen Brain, if I'm remembering correctly? I think so, exactly.

And I can't remember the title of the book off the top of my head, but I cite that profus to be my book. I've also seen other. other kinds of work by foresters themselves. We look at the forest expansion and contraction in the USSR over decades. And they'll claim, this is amazing. I mean, they'll claim that there was net deforestation over time in the USSR. And then the fingers that they show, actually, they obviously the exact opposite of what they're claiming.

So, I mean, it goes that far. So the ideology is so entrenched. And even, like, people who should, who are, like, biophysical scientists are unable to see through the propaganda when it's right there in their face. But brain has done particularly good job at understanding, especially under the Stalin leadership, what was achieved. There was, you know, the usual way in which the great, what was it called? what was under the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Yeah, the Great Plan for Transformation of Nature is usually reviled by many people. But, again, without really looking into the details as to what was accomplished,

was actually done. And one of the lasting positive consequences of the planting of millions of trees to to build shelter belt is actually a forestation of the region that had been deforested for a long time. Stabilization of slopes, reduction of erosion. I mean, one could say cynically, that was only done because, you know,

the hydrology had to be protected. Otherwise, the hydroelectric dams would be malfunctioning. But that could also be said of any other political system but it's really rare that you have these kinds of achievements and certainly not in the US you haven't and we have many problems we certainly don't have

enough forestation program or that of that sort that's ever happened we have just a deforestation program it seems to the point where the Colorado River it's in a lot and then with the drought we having major problems and suddenly all these all these folks in the Biden administration

and all these different states it's like Oh, well, we've got to reduce water consumption. Well, Lance, if you use the great plan that Stalin did, maybe you wouldn't be like saying this stuff. You know, this is, I mean, it's just a bit of exaggeration in some respects. But stabilization of slopes, reduction of solar erosion for the long term is one of the lasting legacies of that project. And usually the way it's presented is this like devastation, this, I mean, it really degenerates

when it comes to that particular five-year plan into a litany of I guess of pejoratives you know are like oh the masculinism involved you know like there's macho rubbish you know this great man

wanting to like you know make himself like even bigger by having this stamp on this huge swath of land you know and and they completely don't get it and I maybe it's too early to talk about this but maybe I'll just mention

it's not Stalin who planted the trees it's rather simple it mobilized millions of people is not done by one individual and it is preposterous to talk about the Stalin leadership as if it represented

the millions of people who built the USSR. Not just preposterous, but it's insulting. And it's certainly, I mean, flying in the face of the basis of, not just Marxist kinds of approaches, but just social history. I mean, even a liberal historian,

we'd be able to get it that it's not individuals who make history, but its entire societies that are involved. So that's one of the things that Losotho there wasn't the point

of the book but I'm hoping that especially those who claim to be Marxist will look at

themselves a little bit critically if they talk about Stalin as if Stalin did this and as if

Stalin is a protagonist the USSR is a protagonist millions of people are protagonists

in this story and and it's it's just unbelievable that to this day

we still have folks on the left who are treating history as sort of like the history of the big man you know, the monarchs you know

it's very they've brought into bourgeois history thoroughly when they do that so La Sourndo that's probably the reason why he's not bothering with the biography of Stalin because that's not the point. The point

is to contextualize ideas and tropes and images about Stalin and that's what he tries to do. And of course, you know, the great plan for the transformation of nature is not Stalin's plan for the Great Translation of Nature. It's millions of people's plan to survive in the post-war period and to be able to rebuild the country. That's what that's about. And that's just what to make sure that people understand that as well. So there are ecological benefits to it, but there are also a very firm social basis

for that great effort that also ends up being a great ecological benefit overall. Anyway, sorry, yeah. No, it was excellent. David, I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts on that. I just want to throw in one quote, actually from our brave boys at the CIA. There's, I have to say that because I'm sure that there's one CIA member watching.

We love you, whoever you are. Don't arrest us. But anyway, to quote the CIA, this is from an internal document in 1953, shortly after Stalin's death. It's titled, Comments on the Leadership Change in the Soviet Union, and it came out essentially right after Stalin's death. death. This is right from the beginning. And as I said, this was an internal memo. So they're not exactly like using this to try to propagandize the populace. Eventually, this was released. And so you can actually find it online very easily. If you just type in CIA, Stalin, a change of leadership or something like that. It should come up really quickly. But I have the saved on my phone.

So it's easy for me to find. Here's here's the very first. point that they have. And I think that this goes along with what Salvatore was saying. Even in Stalin's time, there was collective leadership. Now, this is not talking about like the pre-war years or something like that, you know, or any, this is upon his death and who would know better than the people with all of the resources and reconnaissance and spies and whatnot in the world. The CIA first sentence, even in Stalin's time, there was collective leadership. The

Western idea of a dictator within the communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature in organization of the communist power structure. Stalin, although holding white powers, was merely the captain of a team, and it seems obvious that Khurschav will be the new captain. However, it does not appear that any of the present leaders will rise to the stature of Lenin and Stalin so that it will be safer to assume that developments in Moscow will be along the lines of what is called collective leadership unless Western policies force the Soviets to streamline their power organization. The present situation is the most favorable from the point of view of upsetting the communist

dictatorship since the death of Stalin. Isn't that sad? I mean, that leftist don't get it, but the CIA do. Yes, no, I mean, that's really the point. And then, you know, it's also very funny that they basically state that unless something crazy happened that Hhrushchev, no matter what he did, was going to be able to

overshadow Stalin to any sort of degree or have the same sort of credibility or standing of Stalin. So what happens just a few years later is the secret speech, which is then reported breathlessly across the world, both inside the Soviet Union, as

well as externally. You know, that is that crazy event that they're alluding to, you know, unless something that we can't foresee happens, Hhrushchev is not going to have the same sort of standing. But the reason I bring this quote up is because it drives home the critical thing that Salvatore said, which you said you hoped it wasn't too early in the conversation. Frankly, we should have brought it up at the beginning as it should in any conversation about actually existing socialist states, which is that it's not

the leader. It's not the big man at the helm who's planting the trees, who's, you know, working in the factories, who's coming up with all of the policies, enacting them, ensuring that, you know, food gets on people's tables, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's the millions and millions of people who do everything that they can. And in the Soviet Union, I mean, we have this Stachanovite movement, which is like emblematic of this. So for people who are unaware of the Stachanavites, it was a movement of people who were doing like superhuman feats in terms of increasing their personal productivity at work,

increasing their productivity of what they were able to produce to 300%. It was named after, you know, a minor who was producing superhuman levels of ore by himself. He ended up not having such a happy story in his later life. That's neither here nor there. But the point is that this movement was inspired where millions of people were, were working as hard as they could during their daytime hours, because Le Sordo points out in the book as well, in the Soviet Union, people were more than willing to say, I'm taking off early today from work. My wife is sick. Things like this are going on. The power dynamic in the workplace was really slanted towards the workers, particularly in the Stalin period. But these people while they were at work were really doing what they could to better society. I mean, they had this vision in mind that they were able to do something to better the society that they were living in, that they believed in. And that goes from top to bottom.

There is no, like, one leader who's pulling all of the strings at the top. And it goes all the way down to the lowliest toiler. They are all contributing to this project. And I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind because when we hear Stalin, we tend to get this narrative of him being like, above everyone else or, you know, everything that happened in the Soviet Union during his time, positive or negative, was directly attributable and carried out by him. This isn't true. Anyway, there you go.

Yeah, and, you know, in someone like J. Arch Gay, who's certainly not a communist, has gone through the archives and has demonstrated exactly that. And that it's a very complex set of processes that were in action. Stalin, of course, is responsible for having signed off thousands of death sentences, absolutely. But a lot of those death sentences were also carried out through the kind of even petty liberal power struggles at the regional and some regional levels. And so, you know, that's what he's uncovered. And it's really important. Well, in any case, I mean, if one were to put it into another context,

I'm saying, well, you know, if you've got an austerity program, that's the thought of Biden. I'm sorry, but you have an entire bourgeoisie that is responsible for a lot of a lot of workers in the U.S. And it would be foolish to just point the finger at the leader of a single party. So, you know, it should be self-evident that that's, even especially with respect to political strategy, that kind of ideological framework of looking at history is very damaging for leftists to engage in,

to be that reductionistic in any case. Thanks so much, for bringing that CIA coin and the Thomas Mann. I forgot about that. That's such a precious quote. Yeah. Yeah, and I just wanted to say

on that topic, yeah, it's kind of interesting and one of the chapters really is kind of focuses on why and how this individualizing of history, the function that it serves within like liberal historiography. And it's kind of, you know, you have the great man theory of history, which, you know, doesn't mean morally greats, but just means, you know, that they are the moving prime forces of history, which is obviously the complete inversion of the Marxist conception of history. But the one that in the West, you know, we are trained to view history through this lens. And it also

allows, and Lassardo kind of lays out several examples of this of how it allows, like, the empire to kind of project its worst elements onto these pariah figures like Stalin or a modern pariah. You know, we can say that, oh, this person

is super paranoid and that's why they're so violent and that's why they're so, you know, they commit these horrible crimes because of just, because of constant and unjustified paranoia. You know, paranoia is always unjustified, but they're saying that, you know, but then And equally, you could argue that the behavior of constantly accusing other people of these

horrible things is itself a kind of paranoia that the West is guilty of. And equally, you know, we lay all kinds of barbarism at the feet of Stalin and other figures. And completely, you know, Lassardo's whole project throughout his history has been to re-bring to light the barbarity that's inherent in our system, which is typically, you know, that happens in the colonies or to minority populations. And, you know, there's certain parts of this book that are extremely difficult to read about, you know, historical crimes of the West in various parts of the world, including within their own countries, particularly in North America, on the African American populations in all periods of history, including the modern times.

But yeah, and I just wanted to bring up from earlier, it was mentioned about Dr. Gerald Horne and I was really excited when I discovered in this book that it was a reference because I, you know, when reading both of their works, they often remind me of each other their projects are aligned and it was great to see that LaSoto did engage. I haven't seen the opposite yet and I'm hoping to at some point see in one of Dr. Horne's books. He has so many. There must be one somewhere. So if anyone sees one, please, yeah, let us know.

And hopefully, yeah, it's a real shame that he passed away, of course, because it would have been great to kind of see some cross-pollination between their two projects. But it's great that there are other writers to carry on that legacy of recontextualizing, you know, the history of the West and liberalism and the, you know, bringing to light the incredible amounts of crimes that have been done. And also, to some extent, recontextualizing rather than debunking what other population, you know, what other pariah nations have been accused of doing. As you say, I wanted to just follow up with David Stenger's stuff, as rapidly as I can. Because, you know, when Losotho's book came out, it was very controversial, as I mentioned before. And one of the critiques of Osor do it was coming from within the Defundation and Communist

some of the comrades there was kind of this sense that there was this relativization of of the terrible things that happen under Stalin's leadership. And I think those who think of Rosuldo's text in that way, I think they're misreading the text because it's not about, well, this was relatively, you know, whenever Stalin did it was relatively better than anything the West has done. That's not the point. The point is exactly what you're saying, David,

is to re-contractor, it's to revisit contextualize what was going on, to understand that the conditions were such, not that they necessarily had to produce those outcomes, which is another thing that Los Angeles has been accused of is not historical determinism, which is in same, frankly. If anybody will read the book, we look for the historical determinism in that book and I don't challenge anyone to find it.

But the point in state is really the history of the formation of an ideological construct with respect to Stalin or using Stalin as an ideological construct to undermine communist movements. And then the sort of also brings that contextualization with respect to what has happened as well, which is important. It doesn't delve so much into it because it's not really the point of the book, but it does make allusions at the very least to that aspect.

Yeah. Actually, that really feeds in well to what I was going to say, which is that speaking of relativism, people saying, oh, well, you know, Stalin killed this many people versus the West killed that many people. And on this issue, Stalin was worse. And on the West, on this issue, the West was worse and et cetera, et cetera. That's not the point of the book. It is something that he brings up several times in the book, these comparative analyses. of various places, but this is, again, part of this comprehensive all-round analysis looking at, again, where was the society before? What were the forces that were acting upon that society internally and externally? What were other states at the same time doing? What were other states doing at later periods of time? You know, we have to take all of these things to be able to orient it historically. It's all about orientation.

It's not about expunging the record. It's not about completely, I've used the word whitewash way too many times in this conversation. But, I mean, still, it's effective here. It's not whitewashing the record. It's not saying Stalin did not do bad things. And what Stalin did was either, one, justified or two, not as bad as the West. But it is useful to compare these things. You know, it is useful to have that as a component of the analysis when talking about in something

that comes up very frequently, particularly these days, given current events, is the quote-unquote Ukrainian genocide, the so-called Holodomor, which, I mean, it's undisputed that there was a famine that occurred, but serious scholars, including very anti-communist scholars, are also united in their appraisal that this was not a manufactured genocide. And it was not a manufactured famine. This is not something that was like really at length covered in the book. But the point is, I mean, there was there was some sections about it. But it wasn't like, you know, this this wasn't the purpose of the book was to talk about this a lot of more.

The point is, is that when we look at it, we have to say, we have to be able to say, okay, well, there were some things that were unavoidable. You know, the drought was unavoidable. there were some mistakes that were made. There were some mistakes within the collectivization procedures of agriculture, most certainly, and we have to be able to admit that. But we also have to be able to say that there was internal pressures that were acting that made what unfolded, unfold in the particular way which it did, which again was not an intentional genocide by any means.

I mean, if anything, we should be looking at Kazakhstan, which suffered three to four times worse than Ukraine by population. So if you look at like the number of people who starved in Ukraine versus Kazakhstan in this exact same drought period, this famine, the rate was three to four times higher in Kazakhstan than in Ukraine. So, I mean, even on that fact, it wasn't like an intentional extermination of the Ukrainians. And in fact, Stalin was generally quite fine with Ukrainians. And even as Lacerdo points out, was trying to bring the Ukrainian communities of various other surrounding countries to be more willing to join the USSR and break off of the countries that those populations were parts of. Why would he want to genocide their fraternal members of their ethnic group? Like, it doesn't make sense. But it also is, you know, useful to talk about some of these comparative analyses of roughly the same time period to talk about the Bengal famine, for example.

which I know Salvatore is something that you and I brought up in the forward to the book. You know, it is useful to talk about the fact that three million Bengalis starved to death. And the Bengalis who starved to death, that was intentional. They did deny exporting food to those people and intentionally manufactured a famine. That killed three million Bengalis within this small period of time. I mean, that is genocide. And yet it's never discussed as such. and it's never even used as a comparative point when talking about the so-called Holodomor.

We don't talk about sanctions, modern-day sanctions in the same way. And I'm really glad that Lassardo touched on this in the book, but again, should have been much more detailed on this. He mentioned the fact that, for example, in the first Iraq war, in the sanctions that were put on place on it, 500 Iraqi children were starved to death as a result of that. 500,000. 500,000, yes, I'm sorry, did I say 500? I meant 500,000, of course. And, of course, when Madeline Albright, Secretary of State was asked about it, she said famously, we think it's worth it. We think it's worth starving a half a million children's death.

And that is one specific sanction regime that was put in place. That's not to mention the blockade that's on Yemen right now, leading to the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. That's not to mention the decades of a blockade that's been put in place on Cuba. decades of sanctions that have been put on place on the on dprk north korea decades of sanctions that have prevented china in many cases from being able to provide aid to some other countries decades of sanctions on venezuela decades of sanctions on various countries around the world all of which with the explicit intention of causing suffering in the populaces and in many cases death through starvation we don't compare these to the so-called

Vladimir. We'd bring it up like it's something that happened because Stalin was some monster and there is no equivalent in modern history. As I mentioned, historians, serious historians, are united in the fact that while the famine did happen and the mistakes were made. It was not an intentional genocide. It was not intentionally targeting Ukrainians. We don't talk about how these sanctions today are intentionally targeting populations. By we, I don't mean guerrilla history. We have our ongoing sanctions. This war series and listeners should go back and check out some of those case studies that we've done. In fact, tonight I'll be recording an episode about the history of sanctions on the DPRK in China. It'll actually be coming out, I believe, a week before this

episode. So if you want to hear that one, check the feed one week previous to this. But we don't talk about that. And it's like really infuriating. It's not to say more people die as a result of Western sanctions than died in this famine. And therefore, the famine is no big deal. But it is a critical component to analyzing it in addition to, oh, and I don't even mention the purpose of ideology in all of this. What is the ideological driver of certain events? Is ideology taking the lead and it's a byproduct of the ideology? Or is this action the ideology itself? And in the case of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, that was the ideology that is very different than a certain ethnic group starving at a slightly higher rate than other people that were suffering in

neighboring areas, which were also severely suffering at the same time. That was a byproduct of one of the mistakes of the ideology, the rapid collectivization without a lot of planning in many ways, versus where the ideology of the Nazis was explicitly to exterminate people. So anyway, I mean, there we go. I mean, if one can't differentiate one from the other, I mean, that's really very problematic. I wanted to just mention, and then, David, if you want to come in, please to, I just want to mention for those who are interested, there's an edited volume that came out in 2008, 2009, something like that, it's called The Years of Hunger,

Soviet Agriculture, 1931, 1993. It's edited by R.W. Datees and C.N.G. Wheatcroft. And there is a very thorough examination of what happened, and is one of the several works that demonstrate, you know, exactly what Henry was talking about. It's well worth well reading. Oh, one more thing about the Ukrainian famine was really not just Ukrainian famine. There were also Russians who died of famine. That is hardly. Very high rates, including in the area that I am. Right. Exactly. And that is it's very most curious that it's not discussed, especially among leftists who are bringing this up.

And I've seen this recently in the U.S., you know, in some leftist circle being brought up with respect to the invasion of the Ukraine now. That is just really poor. The other thing, though, is with respect to the difference between the Ukrainian and Kazakh cases relative to what has been made out of that tragedy in the 30s, is that the Ukrainian side produced all this wild accusations through their extreme right-wing forces, the O-U-N, I think, and that's where their propaganda was, I think, even already starting in the 40s, if I remember correctly. And basically, people who are talking about the whole

are really just reproducing Ukrainian and extreme line-wing nationalists or Nazi propaganda, whereas you might want to, if one might want to investigate, why is it not that you have a Kazakh force that does the same thing. And when we have a Kazakh word that is made into a household term about that tragedy, and I have a feeling that it's because in Kazakhstan, unlike the Ukraine, you don't have Nazis perhaps historically that have been at it for decades. And of course, helped out by the Secret Service who is probably written in the U.S. along the way. So from those on the left, you know, they should very much be a little more careful about who they're quoting and what words they use with respect to that for me.

Yeah, great. Well, I mean, I wanted to, you know, I'm not sure how much time we have left, but one of the main arguments of the book I thought that we could touch on because it bears relations to discussions that happen in the present day is, you know, one of the, in several chapters, the topic of, the idea of the betrayed revolution is a key part of kind of how that, you know, the tensions within the Bolshevik party during Stalin's time and how those may have erupted in subsequent years and that kind of thing, you know, he talks a little bit about how they played part into some of the, you know, some of the main events that are taught about, talked about his time, various assassinations, various splits within the party, various disagreements. between different figures, but then also he kind of talks more philosophically,

Lesotho does, and mentions it beyond the Bolshevik revolution. He talks about it in the Chinese revolution, even in the French revolution. And this tension between a kind of the ideal, like an idealism, or he calls it messianism that drives the initial impulse of the population and binds them together as a revolutionary force. and but then as soon as the you know some kind of success is achieved in terms of overthrowing the ancient regime then the practical work comes about about how to construct a post-revolutionary states or community or whatever and inevitably that's when the fractures in the previously combined groups sort of form

And he mentions, it's a really beautiful quotes that I liked describing this. The choral unity that presides over the overthrow of the ancient regime, now disliked by the majority of the population, inevitably cracks or disappears when it comes to deciding on the new order to be built. And he also describes this as the dialectic of Saturn, you know, Saturn consuming his young. and you know there were various factors which specifically that effect in the USSR and he calls it a Bolshevik civil war, you know, the failure of the German revolution, which meant that the much hoped for world revolution did not occur immediately. So the, you know, post Lenin's death, they, you know, the decision was made that they had to focus on constructing and safeguarding the USSR as it was at the time. And that turned out to be very prescient. of what was to come in the next few decades. And then, you know, within that, Lassardo goes through a few different examples of different places where various aspects of society

were moving in different ways, some not quickly enough by other people. So he talked about gender roles and how the abolition of family and some, you know, people were arguing for different views of sexuality and the roles of different genders. and other people were talking about economic issues

and how the NEP, the new economic program, led to accusations of betrayal. It was called the new exploitation of the proletariat and things like that. And we see this kinds of modern arguments happening with the modern states that are run by socialist parties or communist parties and whether they've engaged with capitalism or not.

purely 100% forms of what we would, some people would consider socialism. And this tension is, you know, splitting the left in the current era as much as it was then. I saw a quote from one of my favorite writers Samir Amin, the Egyptian political economist of the powerless west and left. If it is not communism of the 23rd century, it is a betrayal. And I think that, you know, talks about us now, but it's the same tension. that was happening in the immediate post-revolutionary era and it seems to happen, you know, in all revolutions, this, this, accusations of the trail. And yeah, so I thought it was really interesting that that's such a key, you know, runs through several chapters of the book, but it's still something

that we can all see happening every day when looking at movements around the world. Yeah, actually, I was going to add something that I think you're really basically articulated it's so much better than I would have anyway. But I want to, one more thing about it, not in the book by Losotho per se, but something that I think pertains. And it's, I wish I could ask Losotho himself, what prevented him,

or maybe did he know about the work of Naumov and all the other historians who went through the archives and produced a whole bunch of books since the 90s about, the USSR in the 20s, 30s and, you know, for the 50s. And one of them I really mentioned, Jani Archgetti, and one of the things that really got me, again, someone who is not, is probably far from communism as you could get,

you know, as a story in terms of political leanings. And one of the first questions that he asked is, well, how is it possible that a party sets out, to destroy itself I mean you can't really explain that a way as you know like Stalin this or that

I mean you can't really sort of say it's a betrayal and so that's why you know the the concept of of civil war within the Bolshevik party really is it's a useful

way to analyze that situation and what I guess wanted to add and you already sent this David in a lot of respects and maybe this is a restatement I guess but in future this is the stuff that we have to watch out for

and it's occurring in the present of course without having state power imagine having that level of influence and whatever is done has incredible ramifications much greater much beyond even what we

can imagine in countries like the U.S., like where the left is completely marginal at best. And so when you have skirmishes that are occurring, even in such marginal spaces politically in the core countries of the capitalist world economy, like Italy, for example, you have these, we're having these squabbles. So imagine that, you know, when you do take, if not state power, if that's what one wants to achieve but that level of influence in society

and you know one can just maybe I hope appreciate the consequences will be dire as well and deadly so this is something also in terms of organizing for the future

that I think those students book speaks to even though maybe it's not the intended objective but I think that's one way in which we can find that book to be useful as well for organizing. Yeah, I also agree that this book would be really useful for organizing. I think that it's useful in many ways. I mean, it's useful as a reappraisal of Stalin that breaks kind of that hegemonic view

of Stalin that we've had since essentially the secret speech. Up until that point, I mean, we were still getting very, and this is something that Lassurdo points out both in his introduction and in chapter one, is that various people, world leaders who you would not think that would have had a positive opinion of Stalin, would have glowing things to say about Stalin. I mean, how many times in the book did he quote Churchill saying nice things about Stalin? I mean, Churchill's one of the worst people in world history. I mean, the man was an absolutely despicable monster, and his ideological tendencies could not be

farther away from those of Stalin. And yet we still have a wealth of positive appraisals of Stalin by Winston Churchill, of all people. You know, we have positive appraisals of Stalin by Gandhi, again, quoted several times in the book. There's many positive quotes of Stalin that were not included in the book that could have been by other, even if not world leaders, other very prominent individuals who were around at roughly that time, but those dry up after the secret speech to a large degree. And with that coinciding with a really ramping up of the Cold War by the collective West, when people wanted to give more positive appraisals, they were just shut out from having their voice heard at all. Now, as a result of the secret speech, you

didn't have world leaders trying, willing to say positive things. I mean, it's much harder to to not report on something that Winston Churchill says or Gandhi says. But after the secret speech, those sorts of individuals were no longer saying positive things. And the people who were willing to go out and try to break that hegemonic mold as the Cold War started to pick up, they were just blacklisted. You know, they didn't get any, they had their careers ruined and they didn't get their positive statements put into any newspaper anyway. So nobody heard it and their life was ruined. This is what was happening at around that time. So this book is really useful to be able to, one, collect some of those positive appraisals that perhaps you haven't heard of because they

are generally not reported on anymore. Two, having this all around comparative analysis that we've been talking about throughout to get this more rounded view of the Stalin administration. and the actions that were taken. And it's also useful as an exercise for combating many of the tropes that liberals and conservatives use when making arguments against Stalin. Again, I can't tell you how many times I'm online. And I won't even put out like a pro-Stalin tweet. I'll just have something that's like vaguely pro-socialist or pro-communist or maybe

I'll mention the word Stalin in, again, something other than a condemnation. demitory fashion. And you'll have a bunch of liberals and conservatives and people with roses and their rose emojis and their Twitter handles, which in many times are actually the most vicious of the bunch. I will put out there. No hate to those of you who are listening and do have a rose emoji in your Twitter handle. But it's just been, you know, more than a few times that I've gotten into kind of disagreements, let's put it, with some of these individuals. The point is, is that many of the tropes that are trotted out are the same exact tropes that have existed since this narrative and this construction of an image of Stalin was being started to put together. Of course, it existed even before the war, but it really, really started with the secret speech and then the ramping up of the Cold War.

So I think that it's useful for these sorts of things. I don't know if you guys have anything else that you want to say on terms of the usefulness of this book. But I think it's a very useful book and that's why we wanted to translate it. But I think that those are a few things that I'd want to highlight in terms of their particular use. Yeah, I mean, I think it really is a very useful book. You know, for me, it's a kind of case study of how Lizardo's method is

applied to history. And, you know, I think all of his books are flesh out of this, this methodology. And, yeah, obviously, that's very useful for you to be able to do your own analysis of current events and historical events. And, you know, his wealth of reading is unbelievable, like the amount of people he's read and then quoted from. And it's very, you know, incredible. So by reading one book, you almost read a hundred other books so it's useful in that sense but directly this book yeah as we've been talking about i don't you know some people say oh why do you even care like why is it important to um to look at figures who are so maligned and it's just like they say oh this is a you know this is a we've been defeated here we we shouldn't try and do it the the the risk of

blowback is too great so we mustn't attend anything like this but i just think, as what we were saying earlier, that I think that opens us up to more attacks. And it's important to stand our ground and remain, you know, rational and contextualize history properly. Because if we give up that ground, then, you know, it's, it's the ideology will be, will continue to dominate, will continue to reproduce itself. And nothing that we attempt to do will be, will be easy. It'll be much, much harder than it would otherwise be. and it's already a difficult task given the balance of powers, particularly for the West and Left.

And that's another reason I'm very excited about another book of his that has been translated from his final three books, which you mentioned, you both mention in your forward. One, the first of the three books is being translated that he was writing towards the end of his life. And this is kind of, I don't know if you've read any of those Salvatore, but, yeah, obviously all of us are operating within the West and Left, So that's the one that we have to kind of fix.

We can't just luxuriate in the history of previous successes of the communist movements because we have to replicate them and design our own. And I think, you know, being able to make use of the previous history, including its mistakes, but in a reasonable and contextualized way is very useful for us. I think it's the best method. It's a kind of inoculation against the ideology that is dominant everywhere else on the daily news in hundreds and hundreds of other history books that are written and published daily. So, you know, if we can have more grounded understanding of history, more of a comparative analysis methodology like you've been mentioning,

yeah, I think it puts us in good stead for, you know, approaching the future and also having a reasonable perspective on the past. You were mentioning, David, yeah, the two books, right, that we alluded to in the forward, I guess, Western Marxism, and I'm trying to recall what the other one was. I think it was the question of communism. That was, I think, the last book that he wrote, La Christiana Communista.

I don't think, La Castian Communista, I don't think that's been translated, has it? So, which is a shame. That would be, it would be really, I mean, I've just begun to read. Oh, are you looking for more work to do? It hasn't been translated yet. I'm going to die. Oh, man.

But that would be that, I mean, I'm hoping so much that that would be translated. I mean, I can read the original. So I'm taking it for translation. I think it would be important works to translate. Because Western Marxism is being translated. I think through leftward, an 18th. you know, four books. And, but the other one,

La Cristino Communista, I really, I mean, I've only started reading both. I just, I have too much to read, I guess, that I used to go through. But, so I can't really speak on that. And I hope in the near future, I will be able to, at least for those who have not, I've been able to read it in the Italian,

I'll be more than happy to discuss the contents if that would ever be useful. But hopefully, that won't be necessary. what I wanted to suggest also I mean David you put it right at Mark you know it's just it's a losing strategy for cultural

germany to continue repeating a bourgeois ideology from the left it really is and it never made any sense I think in hindsight anyway when you have a when you have

squabbles bickering splits within a communist movement that can only benefit those who have the most power which is not the communist movements usually and so one really, I mean if we have any lesson in this I mean that should also be one of those lessons to learn is not to repeat these mistakes over and over again historically but the other thing is that

maybe the title of Osudu's book that we've translated It should be a bit different. It should be like Stalin history and critique of Western projection. Because basically what he's demonstrating is that throughout these decades, Stalin is really a way of projecting all the insanity that imperialist powers have subjected the rest of the world with. So maybe that's how. I mean, why isn't Churchill reviled, right?

Why isn't every U.S. president reviled to the same extent? I mean, Andrew Jackson on the banknote of the $20 banknote, I mean, that is outrageous, a genocidal maniac. It's just, you know, slaveholders. Those people are awful, right? And yet they're not reviled to the extent, you know, the Stalin is. It's incredible. that just is a testament to how effective a bourgeois hegemony is. And that, so just to reiterate the point, I guess maybe in a different way of what David and also you Henry have said.

So let's combat this bourgeois projectionism. Yeah, those individuals are certainly reviled by us. But yeah, I definitely agree that they should be reviled universally. I have, I don't want to like curtail the conversation because I feel like we could go on. for hours and hours and hours, but I really have two questions that I want to make sure we hit, and then perhaps we'll wrap up. I know we're hoping to be able to do this again on Revolutionary Left Radio soon, with Brett being able to ask us some questions that he has about the text. And so, you know, perhaps we'll leave anything else for that. But the first question

I have, I mean, this is going to be a relatively tough question to try to condense. And I'm going to direct towards you, Salvatore. Although, David, feel free to also hop in. There's, again, this is defining two terms that maybe people aren't familiar with it, you know, having these conceptions within their minds actually might make it useful for viewing the image of Stalin when they come across it, as well as the, how we can view contemporary society as well in some ways. And that would be the concentrationary universe, which is something that's brought up throughout the text and perhaps deserves a little bit of an explanation here for people who are going to be jumping and cold into this text.

I know that we have an editor's note that briefly explains it, but some people just learn better in audio medium. So that one. And then also this anarchoid abstract universalism, I think is another very interesting thing that's touched on, again, throughout the text and might be useful for people to have just this conception, like the existence of this conception within their mind for when they look at the images of ston, or when they're looking at portrayals of modern society.

It's easy for intercity in Italian. The less of concert in the scenario, the concepts, yeah, concentration in a universe, which is quite a mouthful. I mean, it was something that came out of a trap that was once leftist and then turned into an anti-communist. And he actually, someone who, by the name of Rousse, if I remember actually

and it was about Nazi concentration camps of course as the terms suggest concentration area universe meaning a set of

practices that are put into place to concentrate people into basically death camps or camps

that lead to premature death as one could say but it has been generalized from and of course, you know, all the carceral structures that are associated with basically concentrating people in ways that are create unhealthy conditions of premature death. So that was then extended by the late 40s already

to describe the presence in the USSR as well under Stalin and then generalized for the potential for any sort of horrors from bureaucratic and technocratic structures to characterize what some call modernity, meaning like capitalism, really. But of course, then it's, as I was saying before, projected into the Soviet Union, as if it were the same thing. But it's used these days much more to characterize the kinds of the prison systems.

And you've alluded to this before, Henry, you know, the more than 2 million people, incarcerated in the United States, the biggest prison population the world has ever seen. I would add Gaza is an open-air prison as well. One could do that as part of the concentrationary universe as well. And modern analysts would probably do that. So it's actually been taken out of the original from USA and as a concept and being applied to any sort of technocratic, bureaucratic

structures that put a whole bunch of people into horrific situations in a concentration camp like structures or mass incarceration. Perhaps it could be also translated

mass incarceration, but that wouldn't really convey where what Los Souda is drawing And he's drawing from that history of how that concept has evolved over time. So it's a very condensed way of talking about these different characterizations of putting people behind bars or in their concentrated places where they face the potential for premature death. I hope that makes it clearer.

And just totally just but the reason that I wanted that one particularly to be brought up and you hit it perfectly is that it can be utilized for analyzing current conditions, current context that people generally don't put into the same categories as concentration camps or when they, you know, try to equate the prison system in the USSR, the gulags to concentration camps, which also is just foolish. in itself and Lusirot goes through that in the book and so you know instead of us covering that here we'll just recommend that you check that section of the book out but um talking about in the prison population of the U.S., Gaza, those are great, but also those like migrant detention facilities that we see. I mean, there is no better. I mean, I mean, Gaza is probably better, but there's very few better examples of this, uh, an expression of this concentrationary universe as these migrant detention facilities that we see on the southern border of the United States. And that has just become part of the culture of the United States. This

concentrationary universe has leaked out from being simply a legal method, a carcoral legal method to being part of the culture of a country like the United States or like apartheid Israel, the settler colony Israel. So it's important that we think when we understand this term, we're not only applying it to past things, but we should also be thinking about how it fits in with current context. So I'm sorry to cut you off before I let you get to the anorquite abstract universalism. But I wanted, I mean, you hit it, but that was exactly why I wanted us to discuss this term here is that we need to also, if we're going to think about that term and how it has been used to analyze the past, we should also be willing to look at how that term could be used

to analyze the present if we are, you know, deciding that this term is worth using. Which, you know, that is up to the reader. Exactly. But no, thanks for intervening. That really clarifies things much further. And as far as I'm concerned, but, you know, one could also go back to the 1800s and how a lot of indigenous communities were treated by settler colonial,

the empire that is the United States. So this goes back a long while. So when this term was developing, it was developing in a context where Europe, was facing itself, having the principles applied to itself, to go back to an earlier discussion. And as to the anarchoid, and I forgot the rest of it, because consensurate universe is really quite a mouthful in itself,

and I wish we could have found some other way of expressing the same, but I don't think it's too difficult to do that, precisely for the reasons he really alluded to Henry and I discussed. but the anarchoid, what was that? Abstract universalism. Yeah, the anarchoids, I'm sorry, universalism. Okay, so that is, I mean, some might look at that and sneer a bit or turn their eyes, you know, what is he on about?

In the original anachoid, that's how we face it. It's a sort of tendency where maybe the person saying certain things or promoting certain kinds of actions or ideas might not define themselves as anarchist, but they have an anarchistic tendency that they're maybe not even recognizing. but what kind of anarchism, I think there's also greater precision to that term as he is using it. It's a kind of anarchism that is associated with abstract universalism, right? So basically that you have, how to put it plainly, it's a common view. I mean, it's kind of similar to purism in some respects. You know, so abstract universalism is that you, I mean, you're so very well-meaning, set of ideas, and even actions. You want to have the best for all people.

But there is something that kind of is shortcut between the wish and the existing reality. and so that short, you know, kind of like an electrical short is the problem, you know, that you have this universal principles that you want to apply, but it's not really applicable and not to the extent that you want. And so it becomes abstract. So you can, this is what, you know, this is what should be, but it's not. And so you do things as if it is. and that actually is what I guess is referring to

and Lusufi is referring to as an arcoid abstract universalism I would maybe rephrase it but it would probably be a poor rephrasing wishful thinking that could be another way perhaps of saying it but it doesn't really fulfill the translation very well because it's not just willful thinking It's also really taking a concrete situation to such an abstract level that then you come up with strategies that are really self-defeating.

And they're also harmful or potentially very disastrous. One could, if one wished, I would not be on that side. But one could say, well, you know, the collectivist, the collectivization was maybe an abstract universalism. It was not, I would say, I'm just trying to reason this further for clarification purposes. I would think it's not because no, they were actually a set of concrete policies to meet concrete situations because you had many difficulties to have to surmount. It went badly, but not because of wishful thinking, but it's because the concrete situation was such, it was such complexity that it's not that it

was unworkable because it ended up being workable. That's how you got industrialization in the end, but it could have been many fewer deaths if it had been done differently, and if the situation had not been as complex and difficult, if you were not encircled, if you didn't have internal, internal

assigned battles within the Bolshevik Party and so many other issues. So that would be, that's, I wanted to say that because I want to make sure that people don't look at abstract universalism as something that you can just like it, apply to anything, any sort of policy

that goes bad. It's not about that. It's about this tendency which is very close to the concept of purism in which if you don't have the immediate arrival of the desired outcome

then one does extreme things to try and get to it, which actually makes things much worse. including, I think Berosurdo even talks about that to some extent, but it includes also

schisms, you know, over things that one should be splitting about, even the overall situation. And that, I suppose, includes sectarianism that results from this abstract universality. So I hope that that clarifies a bit.

Yeah, and I think Lesotho mentions how, like, yeah, the revolutionary thrust and the post-revolution era is like the ultimate hotbed for this kind of abstract universalism. And I've got a quote that I really like. It's a little bit long, but it's worth reading. And it's from the section called the Dialectic of Revolution and the Genesis of Abstract Universalism. And he says, in the wake of the struggle against the inequalities, privileges,

discrimination, injustice, and oppression of the Anshan regime, and against the particularism, exclusivism, meanness and selfishness, reproached against the old ruling class, the most radical revolutions are led in order to express a strong, exulting, and even emphatic and magniloquence vision of the principles and equality of universalism. It is a vision which, on the one hand, with the impetus and enthusiasm, it implies, facilitates the overthrow of the old social relations and the old political institutions, and on the other hand, it makes the construction of the new order more complex and problematic. So, yeah, it really brings to the front side, this is going to be something that we'll always have to contend with, because you know, the mass movements of peoples will always bring this, you know, as Henry was saying, kind of noble belief of, you know, we can achieve everything immediately and we can have full

communism from day one and it will be wonderful. And there'll be no issues and there'll be no contradictions. Obviously, as dialectical materialists, we're never really going to be able to say that. And elsewhere, you know, you have this kind of caricature of socialism as as what I think it's a quote from Stalin saying universal acetism and a rough egalitarianism where the most pure form of socialism

was in everyone is equally poor kind of thing and that's not what Marxism is about and that's not what the USSR was trying to construct and you know equally on the Western left there is this kind of abstract universalism

which other people you could re-term it is like a kind of purity fetish or even a fetish for failure because as soon as you succeed in your project and have to make practical decisions, you're betraying the revolution. So yeah, this is, sorry, that was a quote from Marx and Engels not style. But anyway, yeah, it's this abstract universalism is something that absolutely is going to be a part of any organizing work that we do, even before the revolution is successful. you know so it's something that we should analyze in historical context to see how other people have gone about dealing with that kind of those those kinds of issues yeah great um so i've got

one last question i want to make sure that we hit and then like i said maybe we'll wrap up unless either of you has something pressing that you want to add in after that the last thing i want to ask is this book is uh it's not perfect you know it's uh no work is and no work is and And I think that it's important that people don't come into this thinking that we're claiming that, you know, this book is the end-all be-all to this topic, that this book is, you know, a flawless work. This is totally critical that, I mean, I think this is a critical book. And that's why we made the translation and that's why we're making it free as a PDF to everybody. I mean, I think that everybody needs to see this. Everybody needs to read it.

And I think everybody's going to get a lot out of it, but it's not a perfect work because, you know, nothing is. And I'm wondering, perhaps in closing, what do you think is the biggest shortcoming of this work? Because there's, I mean, I've said many times, in order to cover everything that I think you should have covered, he needed at least 200, 300, 300 more pages. that's not really a shortcoming so much as it is a page limitation that's often set by a publisher. But there are some things that I certainly think were overlooked. One that is relatively personal to me when talking about deportations of ethnic groups, this is one that is often talked about in society, much more than many of the other myths that he spends quite some time busting in, you know, examining in the book.

The deportation of various ethnic groups is very cursorily touched on and doesn't mention many of the most affected groups. And this is why I bring up that it's particularly personal for me. So my wife is Crimean Tatar. And a great family story is her, we call it her grandma, it's actually her great aunt, but there's no distinction in the Russian language. So if I say her grandma, that's just how we refer to her, but understand that it's her great aunt. And you'll understand why it would not really be possible for it to be her grandma very shortly. Her grandma was a Crimea Tatar scout during the great patriotic war. She was operating in occupied Crimea, for people who are, you know, not familiar with World War II history, particularly acutely, Crimea was captured quite early on and was held for quite some time. And so a lot of the actions that were being taken in Crimea were under a state of Nazi occupation. And so her great Dan, her grandma, as we call her, was operating as a scout as a scout younger than 20.

You know, she was less than 20 years old and was doing something that absolutely was vital for the resistance to the Nazis. And eventually she was captured, she was tortured, wouldn't disclose any useful information and so then they executed her and sadly it was she was executed shortly before the liberation of Crimea at the age of 20 might I add you know this this was an exceptionally young girl who was doing exceptionally dangerous but critical work I have her biography with me I know that the listeners aren't going to be able to see it but I'll just show it to you it's in Russian and I've got a picture here which again for the listeners is not really going to help but you know at least for Salvatore and Dave they'll get to to see so she was captured

tortured and executed by the Nazis fighting for her country the Soviet Union fighting for socialism and what happened in the aftermath of this. It was something like three weeks afterwards when the Crimean Tatars were en masse deported from Crimea, their homeland. And it happened, again, it would have been interesting to have in the book because this is the sort of event that really would have lent itself to some sort of reappraisal. Because again, LaSerto is not whitewashing any of the, well, I just shouldn't say any of the events because a lot of the things. that he's talking about are just outright lies and fabrications. But in terms of the events that

like did happen, he's not whitewashing them. He's orienting them. This would have been really interesting for him to be able to use his analytical and methodological approach to orient that historically. But the Crimean Tatar people are not mentioned at all in the book. And I mean, their entire population was deported and were out of Crimea for 50 years. My wife was born in Uzbekistan because her family had been deported from Crimea, despite the fact that her grandma, again, great aunt, was a war hero, you know, winning awards posthumously for her actions. And only later, shortly after my wife's birth, were they able to move back to Crimea, where she then grew up and had, you know, various other experiences afterwards, including in 2014, when

the Ukrainian, you know, the Ukrainian government decided to cut off electricity and water supply to the peninsula, causing young people like her to have to study by candlelight and worry about when was water coming in. So, you know, like this is a part of that history as well. But for me, it was a big oversight to not try to orient in some way. You know, again, he's not expunging the record. Orienting. This would have been perfect. for us to be able, as viewers, to see how he would take this event, which I am sure he would also claim was a travesty.

Any rational person would think it was a travesty. But, you know, there is a record. The Crimean Tatar population did have a fairly substantial amount of Nazi collaborators, not nearly as many as were in the Red Army. It's worth noting that if you look at the actual statistics, it's like multiple times, many times higher the number of participants in the Red Army compared to Nazi collaborators, but they did have a fairly high rate of Nazi collaboration compared to other people that were within the Soviet Union.

It would have been interesting for him to be able to discuss that using his analytical and methodological methods and discuss how it still is a travesty, but just using it as a buzzword for the terror of Stalin, you know, being able to deport the entire ethnic group, making it sound as if it happened out of thin air, that's how it's presented. That's how it's portrayed. And unfortunately, we don't get to see any of the sort of analysis from Lassurdo on that topic. Because while deportations are mentioned, it's usually talking about German deportations, like deportations of Germans, rather than deportations of some of the ethnic groups within the Soviet Union, which again is something that's talked about very frequently it's not like some marginal thing that you don't ever have to contend with so for me that was one of the biggest oversights in this book and it doesn't diminish the work that was done in the book but i i feel like again like 30 extra pages could have been spent on that topic alone and really would have been warranted justified and almost necessary for this project to feel like a well-rounded project but again i have that personal connection so uh i'm you know kind of slightly

biased to feeling like that's a very, very critical thing. But for me, that's it. But for you, too, I'd like to hear from each of you what you think is the biggest, you know, oversight or shortcoming within this text for the listeners to know that going in. Just to add to that, because it reminds me immediately of something that is sort of as a problem. And that is that in the book, there are occasions in which the Souda goes at length into a what could have been really a tangent

they need not have been there. I mean, they talks about discussions with respect to Marx and there are aspects that actually are covered and much more extensively in his book on liberalism. They really didn't need to

be repeated there. And so that you know, that space could have been taken exactly by the issues that you raised, Henry, among other ones. I'm sorry, I jumped in, sorry, David, if you want to express, you know, first, you know, what you've seen as wanting in that book. That'd be great. I have some others. Yeah, it was just kind of similar points on something that was talked over very briefly. And for me, I thought it even almost had a bit of a dismissive.

quality, which I thought it could have benefited from more engagements. It was part of the discussion of the abstract universalism and in the section on the vanishing of the family and about changing gender relations and family structures within the early Soviet Union. And it doesn't get very, it gets a couple of pages at most. And Alexander Collenshire is just mentioned as a kind of women's advocates and someone who was open-minded about alternative ways of, you know, reproductive labor. But in the text, it kind of gets quite dismissively, just completely swept in along with all of the other complete abstract universalisms, as if any kind of questioning of established gender roles is, you know, detriments to the, the revolutionary cause,

which obviously is a problem among the wider left, both of the time and still is. people suggesting that, you know, anything other than purely economic questions are, you know, not really revolutionary. So we shouldn't consider them. And for me, I would have, you know, Alexander Collensai a bit more of, of that perspective. And a bit, you know, this wasn't the book necessarily to write about general relations and the L, the USSR. But for me, it just came across as like, oh, this is super interesting. And then it was just like kind of swept away. So, yeah, that was my kind of. low points, but yeah, I think in other books, there are

other books about that, so I would like to do more study on that. I can add to that as well, I mean, that there was the there was a decriminalization of homosexuality early on and then it's kind of recriminalized.

I think that's a big deal, but again, it's the point of course is to is to dissect the development of an idea about a historical figure. And

with that said, I mean, I'm not sure that that would have really been suitable, but it would have been another important, especially at the time of writing, the early 2000s, it would have been

especially appropriate to write about gender and sexuality aspects. And and where the Stalin leadership was not exactly on the correct side, but it would have been an occasion to demonstrate that as a flaw that was common to liberalism as well and not as something particular to the Stalin leadership. So, you know, there could have been an occasion to do that and, you know, it doesn't come up in the book and it's a shame.

But then again, Los Urdo is part of a particular generation as well. And also, he also needs to be contextualized historically in terms of his background. And I can also understand how that can be missed, even though certainly not, as far as I know, he's no homophore at all. But in any case, there are, for me, also, it would have been great if in that book, there would have been, but this is something that I'm used to in the, mostly the Anglophone academic sphere. So perhaps this is also not much of critique as much as, you know, something that maybe if this work would have been published in a, in a, I guess a context like the U.K.S. or Canada or Australia or something,

then there should be like a section where the historical materialist methodology would have been explained and clarified rather than being kind of woven in to the text, which I like as well. So that makes it more difficult in other respects for this. to be the kind of work that could be used for organizing too because there's there's that aspect missing like okay how do we do this okay but we have to follow the entire book and see the examples you know to understand methodology but it wouldn't be great to have a methodology section where one is taken by the hands like this is how you do the archival work and this how you do this you know you take these um these um discourses and

it's how you dissect them it's how you put them in context but i mean he shows that he just I thought that would be very nice. In other words, what I find missing is the pedagogical component in Losurville. And that is not just that work. Having read other bits and pieces and whole other works, I see this as a problem. This is much too much for an academic crowd with a lot of background in not necessarily philosophy and history,

but there's a lot that is presumed as knowledge. And that is a hindrance or can be a hindrance. So that's really, but one of the flaws that I see in that. Well, I hope that this conversation has helped orient the listeners in some way then. So even if they don't have that background, they'll be able to get more out of the work when they get their hands on it. Again, the book that we're talking about is Stalin, History and Critique of a Black Legend. We're releasing a new translation with a all-new forward written. by Salvatore and myself, it's going to be coming out from Iskra Books, which is the imprint of

the Center for Communist Studies, who also puts out Peaceland and Bread. Be sure to follow them on Twitter. And the book is due to come out July 1st, which will be shortly after we put this episode out. And hopefully by that point, you'll be able to pre-order the book if you want a print copy. And again, you'll be able to get free PDFs of the book. when it does come out on July 1st. So let me again thank my two tremendous guests and genuine friends that we were able to work together on this project and able to converse about this work. I really enjoyed the conversation today and I really enjoyed the process of putting this together with you. It was a really, it was just a pleasure. And I'm hoping

forward. I'm hoping that we can do more together as we go forward, although hopefully something slightly less labor intensive until I get some energy back, because this project, it really did take a lot out of me, but it was a labor of love. And I think that the listeners will be really happy to see how it came out. So again, one of our guests today was David Pete. David, how can the listeners find you? And the Center for Communist Studies on Twitter, anything else that you want to advertise. Yeah, well, you can find me on Twitter at Davism, which is spelled D-A-J-V-E-I-S-M.

And you can follow Iskra Books on Twitter at ISK-R-A Books. And likewise, Peace Land and Bread magazine is at PLB magazine. So we put all information about recent releases and everything that we're up to. So please follow those. And of course, I will link to all of those in the show. Show notes, Salvatore, my friend, it was great to see you again. I don't get to see you nearly as often as I would like, but hopefully that'll be changing soon. Although with your and my work schedule, I doubt it, but I can always hope.

How can the listeners find more of your work? I don't know if you have any, like, websites or anything or, you know, Twitter. I don't know if you use it that you want to direct them to. If not, just tell them, you know, some of your books and other projects that you've worked on, your journals that you edit. They're all great resources. So if nothing else, the listeners should definitely check out the other works that you've put out. I mean, I feel the same way.

It's three years and honest to be back as well. It's just hopefully we will have a chance to meet more often. And also with David, I'm so happy to meet you finally. To reach me. Well, I guess I have my email address. I'm not sure you want to be giving that out I'm not sure either but I guess you can

you can probably find me through the journal Capitalism, Nature Socialism which is an ecological Marxist eco-socialist sort of academic sorts of activist oriented journal unfortunately it's not really downloadable stuff but that should not be an obstacle

just that's why I guess giving my email will be important. And, you know, if that, let's see, how do you reach me then? I'm not sure, but it'll be very easy. You only have to like Google my name and you'll find my email. It's not really hidden. So don't hesitate to ask for a PDF for anything that you see in that journal. And the other journal is Human Geography.

It's also an academic journal. It's of Marxist orientation. It is around through Sage, but also through the Institute of Human Geography. And I'm the reviews editor there. And if you're interested in anything in that, Zine, let me know. Otherwise, I am not just old school,

but just inept at social media. And so I'm just not even bothered. I'd fail miserably, so I suppose to reach me, it's just the institutional way, and I'll be more than happy to respond. My book, Enreal, has only mentioned socially states and the environment, if you're interested in that, please let me know. I'd be also more than happy to share a PDF for that. I also have work on urban agriculture, and it's urban food production. for eco-socialism. It's another book that I've co-authored. Recently, there might be of interest and we also get the chance to praise Cuba for all their accomplishments. So if you're interested

in that, great. And hopefully forthcoming soon will be an introduction to eco-socialism, which is what I'm currently. Thank you so much. Of course, and we will bring you back when you have that introduction to Eco-Socialism book, where I'm really looking forward to it. But you just reminded me, Salvatore, and I know that I should be wrapping us up. And I doubt that many people are still listening, but I have to tell this story. So I come to Russia via Germany from the U.S. So I was living in Germany. I had to go to the U.S. in order to get a visa to come to Russia, and I've lived here for two years and plan on staying for quite a bit longer. But I obviously was not able to bring very many books in my two suitcases. One of the books that I

took was socialist states in the environment. I think it's one of the most important ones. I haven't, you know, in the room right next to me. So it's, it's really one of the most important books I think that I've read in the last few years. So when I came here, I made sure this was one of the books I took. And interestingly, and this is where the funny part comes in. When we brought you on the show last time to discuss your book, I remember I had two or three critiques for you. It comradely critiques. And I thought that they were funny. In that I knew what you were saying, but the way that it was presented, I had some,

you know, I don't want to say issues with, but some questions about. And so, oh, the book just snuck through the door. So if listeners heard the door open and then close, the book is now sitting right next to me, thanks to my wonderful wife, who is listening through the walls. In any case, one of the, I don't, a critique is a bit hard. One of the things that I kind of pushed you on in that last episode about your book was how you framed Stalin and how pretty much every time you brought up Stalin, you always used a negative term surrounding it, you know, regime or, you know, brutality or I don't remember exactly the terms because it's been a while since I've actually gone through and looked at all of those references to Stalin. in the book, but there was always an adjective somewhere nearby that had a negative connotation to it. And I pushed you on that. We had this, you know, like, oh, I actually didn't mean any of that.

I was, I guess, subconsciously putting that in there because, you know, most people see Stalin and they're like basically expecting it. So I was just kind of putting that in there. That was right before I started working on this project when we had that conversation. And so it was also present in my mind when I knew that I needed to reach out for assistance in getting this project together, in addition to you being one of my favorite people and therefore like being right on the top of my mind, that conversation that we had on that last episode where I pushed you and you were like, you know, that is weird that I was using that. Like, it really wasn't intentional. That came right to the forefront of my mind. And I knew immediately that like one minute later,

I sent out the email saying, Salvatore, are you interested in helping with this project? So that, yeah, I just remembered that because you brought up the book in the fact that we had that conversation last time. So really interesting. Like, in some ways, that conversation was also the genesis for this project. So that is amazing. And, you know, I mean, I'm still thankful to you for having spotted all that. I think I spotted at least 12 occasions when I had done that.

And, you know, but really it was very helpful because it made me rethink, you know, how I was writing and what I was, I guess, inadvertently buying into, with which I say it's a good thing. This is an audio recording, so nobody will have to see the redness in my cheeks too much. but I thank you very much for all these kind words but it's quite amazing yeah I had no idea about that connection but it's I guess it's perfect but it really has helped me rethink a lot of things

and in fact I hope I get the chance to rewrite that volume expand on it and write it differently and I also have to thank you for enabling me to think much much more thoroughly about how

I've phrased things, but also just in general, like what should not be taken for granted, at the very least. Oh, it was my pleasure. One of my favorite conversations I had, and like I said, definitely one of, I think, the most important books. And if you do end up rewriting it, I was going to get, I was going to try to get this copy that I have with me autographed at some point.

But if you end up with a new edition, I'll just get the new one then, because I really, I definitely would happen to take, you know, have both additions. So I guess I should close us out now, now that we've been going into like personal stories here at the end. Again, I don't even know who's listening anymore. But listeners, if you enjoyed any of these like kind of chatty conversations and anecdotes at the end, let us know via the various means that we've given you. Always nice to know that people stick around until the end. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-U-C-1-9. 95. I'll, of course, be tweeting all of the updates about when pre-order is available

for the book and where you can get it when it actually is out and things like that. You can follow my co-hosts who, again, we're unfortunately unable to make it today, but hopefully we'll be able to talk with at least breath about this very soon on Rev left. You can follow Adnan at Adnan A. Hussein on Twitter. That's H-U-S-A-N-Husain, Hussein. and follow his other show, The Mudge List, which focus on the Middle East

and Muslim Diaspora. It's a great show. I learn a lot from it. You can follow Brett and find all of his work for Revolutionary Left Radio and the Red Menace by going to Revolutionary Left Radio.com.

And I, of course, you can also follow Gorilla History, like I mentioned at the top of the show by following at Gorilla underscore Pod, Q-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-S-Core-P. And if you appreciate what we do and want to help us keep doing what we do, you can support us by going to

Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, guerrilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.