The man who wrote this book is biased. I knew that before getting into it and I knew it even more well coming out. He frequents communist rallies and he has a politically motivated ambition to rehabilitate Stalin in particular. If I want to get a fair historical assessment of Hideki Tojo, I won't ask the leader of a Japanese Nationalist party just like I wouldn't ask this guy if I wanted a fair historical assessment of Stalin. With that said, I decided to read the book anyway out of morbid curio

The man who wrote this book is biased. I knew that before getting into it and I knew it even more well coming out. He frequents communist rallies and he has a politically motivated ambition to rehabilitate Stalin in particular. If I want to get a fair historical assessment of Hideki Tojo, I won't ask the leader of a Japanese Nationalist party just like I wouldn't ask this guy if I wanted a fair historical assessment of Stalin. With that said, I decided to read the book anyway out of morbid curiosity and it was certainly a different kind of read.



The main goal of the book isn't necessarily to disprove every accusation leveled at Stalin in Khrushchev's secret speech but rather to prove that for many of said accusations, the evidence does not exist. In some other cases, Furr shows that evidence released since the speech has proved some claims false and purports that (and he is likely correct on this count) Khrushchev and his cronies must've had access to this information at the time of the speech and so their claims are purposely deceitful and misleading. Of course, Khrushchev was not as much of a bumbling buffoon as many today believe and it isn't hard to perceive why a speech like this (even if everything Furr claims is false is so) would be politically opportunistic for him. In a few cases, Khrushchev doesn't even make accusations but rather makes implications and that's where things really get problematic.



To make a long story short, the book itself is incredibly deep in regards to history. If you aren't up to snuff on your Soviet history from the late '20s to the early '50s and all the figures that dominated those decades, this book will often lose you in the slog of details and hard-to-pronounce (and remember) names. You also won't find any real concessions on the part of Furr until halfway through the book (where he concedes that not "everything" Khrushchev claimed was incorrect) - I think I'm not alone when I say that these concessions would've been nice to read as an introduction before getting into the meat of the book. The other thing curious readers should note is that this book is strictly about the claims of the Khrushchev's speech - try as you might, the jury is out on the Gulags and the famines of the early '30s.



There are many, many, many references in which Furr cites and to be honest I'm not interested enough to go looking into them and fact-checking them or assessing their reliability. I'll leave that to the next batch of historians that decide to write a book in Stalin's defense. Because of this, I can't say with any sort of certainty how true the conclusions are that Furr comes to but I will say he has certainly convinced me that there are falsehoods in Khrushchev's claims and that he was an unabashed opportunist who in many ways was just as guilty as Stalin. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who isn't seriously interested in Stalin's era or Soviet history in general. This isn't easy reading and requires thoughtfulness to keep up with what Furr is talking about.