Blood Lies

The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Synder's Bloodlands is False

Grover Furr

978-93-50025-11-6

Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2017

588 pages

Price INR 895.00
Book Club Price INR 672.00
INR 895.00
In stock
SKU
pro_1807

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Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder (NY: Basic Books, 2010) is by far the most successful attempt to date to equate Stalin with Hitler, the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. It has received dozens of rave reviews, prizes for historiography; and has been translated into 25 languages.

Snyder's main target is Joseph Stalin. His broader claim is that the Soviets killed 6 to 9 million innocent civilians while the Nazis were killing about 14 million. Snyder finds parallels between Soviet and Nazi crimes at every turn.

Grover Furr methodically checked every single footnote to anything that could be construed as a crime by Stalin, the USSR, or pro-Soviet communists. Snyder's main sources are in Polish and Ukrainian, in hard-to-find books and articles. Many sources are reprinted in Blood Lies in their original languages – Polish, Ukrainian, German, Russian – always with English translations.

Furr has found that every single "crime" Snyder alleges is false – a fabrication. Often Snyder's sources do not say what he claims. Often Snyder cites anti-communist Polish and Ukrainian secondary sources that do the lying for him. Not a single accusation holds up.

Blood Lies exposes the lies and falsehoods behind the Soviet history of the Stalin period with the same meticulous attention to detail as Furr's 2011 work Khrushchev Lied, and his 2013 book The Murder of Sergei Kirov.

Grover Furr

Grover Furr graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1965 with a B.A. in English. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1978. Since February 1970 he has been on the faculty at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where he specializes in medieval English literature.

He has regularly given presentations at conferences of the Modern Language Association. He has also given presentations at the Left Forum in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, as well as participated in the Rethinking Marxism conferences of 2006, 2009 and 2013.