Book Review: "Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend"

A New Translation of the Late Domenico Losurdo's Book is a Tour de Force

Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend is an absolute tour de force. It should be required reading for all Marxists.

Losurdo was an eminent Italian historian, author, communist, and Marxist philosopher. He is the author of dozens of books on Marxist history and theory, including Liberalism: A Counter-History and Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it Can be Reborn.

Losurdo died in 2018, at the age of 77, due to brain cancer.  

Losurdo’s book was originally published in Italian in 2008. Iskra Books released a long-awaited English translation by Henry Hakamaki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, in 2023. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend will hopefully be the first of several English translations of Losurdo’s work in the years to come.

Joseph Stalin remains a controversial figure even among the Western left. The reigning image of Stalin today is one of a blood-thirsty, ignorant, authoritarian tyrant who sought power merely for the sake of power. He is Evil Personified. To wit, the pop-culture listicle website, WatchMojo lists Stalin at the #2 slot in its list of the “Ten Most Evil Men in History.” (Mao Zedong is included at #6. Adolf Hitler, appropriately, occupies the Number One position. Hey, at least the list compilers got one right!)

This cartoonish, one-dimensional image of Stalin prevails on the socialist left today. Most Western socialists (particularly those oriented around Trotskyism and “democratic-socialism”) dismiss Stalin out of hand as a “dictator” whose policies represented a “betrayal” of Marxism. Likewise, these anticommunist leftists insist that the Soviet Union was “never really socialist!” Rather the USSR represented, in their view, something called “state capitalism.”

This dismissal and condemnation of figures like Stalin in particular, and the real-life examples of actually existing socialism in the former USSR, the Eastern Bloc, Cuba, Venezuela, and China, is a symptom of what Midwestern Marx’s Carlos Garrido calls the “purity fetish.”

However, as Losurdo makes clear in the book’s introduction, this contemporary, Cold War-influenced image of “Stalin the Dictator,” is entirely at odds with how Stalin was perceived during his lifetime. Indeed, millions flocked to Moscow to mourn Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1953. “Millions of [Russian] citizens felt his death as a personal loss,” Losurdo quotes Russian historian Roy A. Medvedev. In neighboring Budapest and Prague, “men and women wept in the streets,” upon learning of Stalin’s death.

Even many of Stalin’s imperialist rivals (such as Winston Churchill) or those who supported Trotsky (author and Polish communist, Isaac Deutscher), were moved, upon Stalin’s death, to pay lauding tributes to the man who led the Soviet Union in defeating the Nazis.

Thus, as the book’s title suggests, Stalin’s image is today marred by a “black legend,” a phrase invoked by historians originally used to demonize the Spanish empire. Historians will contrast a “black legend” with a “golden legend,” regarding a historical figure or group of people. The practice compares “two extreme, simplistic, one dimensional approaches to a character which portrayed him as a god or a demon.”

Losurdo meticulously challenges the origins and continued perpetuation of this “black legend” that surrounds Stalin. What he finds is that most of the crimes and accusations against Stalin rest on, in the words of Roger Keeran and Joseph Jamison, “unsubstantiated allegations, a neglect of well-established facts and testimony, the willful omission of historical context, and the reliance on preposterous analogies, such as the equation of Stalin and Hitler.”

“Losurdo’s discourse evokes awe and outrage at the spectacle of the clever and brazen ways that western intellectuals have crafted a false image of Stalin,” Keeran and Jamison write in their review of the book on MLToday.com, “while wallowing in their own self-righteousness and in the adulation of the powers that be.”

Losurdo traces the origins of the Cold War propaganda campaign against Stalin to Nikita Khrushchev’s closed session address to the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, on February 25, 1956. (Also known as the “secret speech.”) In the speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the “cult of personality” that surrounded him. He accused Stalin — without any evidence — of practicing mass repression among Communist Party members, of executing his rivals (including leaders like Sergei Kirov), and of being a lackluster and uninformed military commander during the Second World War.

“More than by a logic of politics or Realpolitik,” Losurdo writes of the image Khrushchev painted of Stalin, “the bloody repression he [Stalin] unleashed was dictated by personal whim and by a pathological libido dominandi [or ‘lust for power’].”

Khrushchev’s “revelations” were gleefully accepted by the U.S. capitalist ruling-class, as well as by many communist parties, particularly in the West. The “secret speech” created a bitter schism among socialists and, in the minds of many leftists, forever tarnished the example of the world’s first socialist country. This schism remains today.

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend thoroughly examines and debunks these myths and accusations against the Soviet leader. Losurdo counters, among other accusations, the assertion that Stalin was a lousy military commander. On the face of it, this charge against Stalin is ludicrous. How does a “lousy,” “withdrawn” military commander help lead his nation in almost single-handedly defeating the Nazi menace?

Indeed, contrary to the popular belief that the “U.S. won WWII,” it was the Soviet Union that did most of the heavy fighting. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in battle against the Nazis.

And this is to say nothing of the rapid, historically unprecedented industrialization and military development the Soviet Union was forced to undergo. Even the Nazis themselves (as indicated by Goebbels’ diary entries) were thoroughly unprepared for just how formidable a foe the USSR turned out to be.

Losurdo, likewise, carefully examines the claim that Stalin played a role in the firing and later execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky, in 1937. This incident is often used by anti-Stalinists as evidence of Stalin’s “lust for power,” and his insistence on murdering any and all detractors. Yet, as Losurdo observes, it is crucial to understand the historical context that led Stalin and the Soviet leadership to undergo such extreme actions. This context consists of “mutual accusations of treason and collusion with the imperialist enemy,” as well as the “real activity of secret services in recruiting agents and in deception.”

Losurdo takes on the (ludicrous, yet nonetheless prevalent) claim that Stalin was antisemitic. Stalin spent his entire life denouncing antisemitism, which was a crime in the Soviet Union punishable by death. Indeed, no prominent figure on the left likely did more to help establish the state of Israel than Stalin.

(The thinking at the time of Israel’s founding was that Israel would emerge as a socialist state — and thus, as an ally of the USSR. There was, initially, a lot of support for Zionism among socialists. Stalin was also, likely, hoping to strike a blow to British imperialism by supporting the establishment of Israel. Suffice to say, by 1967, the Soviet Union had severed its political and financial ties to Israel.)

And Losurdo tackles Stalin’s alleged role in intentionally manufacturing a famine in Ukraine (the so-called “Holodomor”). While famines were quite common in the East at the time, the myth that Stalin caused the 1932-1933 grain shortage in Ukraine through forced agricultural collectivization has been largely debunked. Nonetheless, the Holodomor fiction remains a useful anticommunist talking point. Robert Conquest, a British intelligence agent turned Cold War historian, was the chief proponent of this myth.

Yet, as Losurdo documents, the Soviet Union was always committed to honoring and celebrating Ukrainian nationalism. Stalin referred to Ukrainians as “brothers and comrades.”

“It is obvious that there is a Ukrainian nation,” Stalin stated, “and it is the duty of Communists to develop its culture.”

Thus, these sentiments seem quite at odds with the image of a “vile dictator” who starved Ukraine simply for his own megalomaniacal designs.

And Losurdo’s book is no mere hagiography. Stalin relies on 364 sources and “well over 1,000 points of citation within the text.” What is more significant is that throughout the book Losurdo relies on sources and citations from figures who would not be inclined to defend Stalin. These figures include, again, Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, and Trotskyist author, W.S. Rogowin. The latter confirms that the “Moscow trials were not an unmotivated and cold-blooded crime, but Stalin’s reaction in the course of an acute political struggle.” Indeed, Losurdo demonstrates that a “fifth column” did exist within the Soviet government in the 1930s.

“The Goebbels Diaries disclosed that Hitler’s secret service had three clandestine radio transmitters broadcasting into Russia,” Jamison and Keeran write. “Any government would regard these facts as a threat to national security.”

This translation of Losurdo’s book is a welcome intervention into contemporary socialist politics. And it joins the ranks of a small but growing body of work which, in recent years, have begun to discredit the black legend that surrounds Stalin. As Losurdo writes, “On the whole, the caricatured portrait of Stalin drawn first by Trotsky and then by Khrushchev no longer enjoys much credit.”

“It now becomes clear that the Secret Speech is entirely unreliable,” he adds. “There is no detail in it that is not contested today.”

During this period of profound and ongoing capitalist crisis, in which thousands of working-class people have been introduced to the concept of socialism, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend is essential reading.