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Douglas Greene, "In Stalin's Shadow: Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials" (Resistance Books, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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Marshall Poe
Experian hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. Podcast as you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stephen Dozeman
Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozman. Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we'd be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scatter defenders though, putting out books and articles trying to turn his legacy into something commendable that we ought to try and build upon today. Returning today is Douglas Green, who is not one of his defenders, but instead has written a book exploring the defenses of Stalin with his new book in In Stalin Shadow, Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials. Much of the text is concerned with fact checking, going through the middle decades of the 20th century to give a critical accounting of Stalin, but one that nonetheless holds on to the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Beyond this fact checking mission though, the book also takes this time as an opportunity to reflect on some of the deeper structures of thought that might lead one to defend Stalin. Or rather than a simple mistake that can be easily corrected with a couple new facts. Greene sees neo Stalinism as a sort of leftist conspiracy theory, one that mirrors much of the paranoia of Stalin's own time. The book then is an opportunity to reflect on what sort of reasoning takes us into these sorts of dead ends and what sort of reasoning might be needed to help us start building towards a truly revolutionary future. Much of the content of this book builds on Greene's previously published book, the Dialectics of Saturn, which we discussed here a couple years ago. Douglas Greene is an independent historian. His many previous books have included A Failure of Vision, Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn, Anti Communism, Marxism and the Fate of the Soviet Union and the New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky, the Renegade's Revenge, all of which have been previously discussed on this show. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice.
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Douglas Green, welcome back to the New Books Network.
- [04:37]
Douglas Green
Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.
- [04:39]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, you've been on a few times, but just for people who either forgot or haven't heard you before, could you maybe introduce yourself to listeners? Just give us a quick synopsis of what your writing and research tends to focus on, what your areas of interest are.
- [04:54]
Douglas Green
Sure. So I'm Doug Green. I'm an independent Marxist historian living in the greater Boston area. I tend to write a lot on history theory, particularly from a Marxist perspective and generally on the 19th and 20th centuries. And for those who don't know, I've written on Louis Auguste Blanqui, the French communist from the 19th century, Michael Harrington, the founder of the Democratic Socialist of America. I also have a book on Stalinism called Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn, which looks at various intellectual debates related to Stalinism. And I also have a book called the New Reformism, which deals with Karl Kautsky and contemporary forms of neo Kautskyism. And this latest book is actually dealing with questions related to Stalinism.
- [05:45]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, jumping right off of that. So you mentioned in the introduction that you were kind of hesitant to write this book, but that it was actually a conversation with one of your friends and occasional co writer Harrison Fluss that convinced you that this book might be worth doing the research and writing. So I'm curious if you could just give us a snapshot of some of those conversations and what kind of made you feel that this book on Stalin and the legacy of Stalin needed to be written?
- [06:19]
Douglas Green
Sure. So, I mean, I came into the left largely through interests in Soviet history. Trotsky, Stalin, that kind of stuff. So it's always interested me. And this is going back like many decades. And you know, when you delve into the weeds, you find people who really apologize for a lot of the very unsavory parts of, say, Soviet history, one of whom is Grover Fur, who I had. I'd actually met him a few times. I have read some of his books and I just found it some of like the. The most atrocious and poorly argued material I've ever seen. And for a long time, I, like more than 10 years ago, I'd written like a short little article, you know, against some of his major claims. And I thought that was enough. But fast forward. Until about two years ago, my good friend and comrade Harrison Fles, we were talking and he's like, you know, there's all these neo Stalinists out there. Someone's got to actually engage them at the level of theory and refute them. And, you know, we kind of went back and forth and he's like, you know, you could probably do it. It's like you. It's. And I said, yes, I, I could. But I think the biggest hurdle, and I. I want to emphasize this is like, I'd actually have to sit down and read all the Grover Firm material, which I hadn't done in like 10 years at that point. But he eventually convinced me. He's like, listen, someone's got to do the dirty work for this and just sift through it, clearly present what the arguments are and then, you know, take them down methodically. And once I kind of get over my disgust because I find a lot of this material not pleasant to read, it's arguing again, it's arguing for outright falsehoods and atrocities, and it's just not also very well written. But once I get over all of that, I just kind of set to work and I don't regret it because there is some material out there refuting Fur and some of these other figures, because I also wanted to bring in some other segments of the neo Stalinist left is I don't think anyone has tried to take them all on at the same time. So that's kind of what I decided to do. And in addition, I also wanted to provide like, a lot of historical background because there are certain chapters in the book that deal with, like, the experience of, like, members of Communist parties at different points in history. And I think bringing that all together, I was able to, you know, kind of give you the lay of the land of, like, the mentality and the historical context where these ideas develop, but also their contemporary expressions, you know, from different segments of the quote, unquote, Marxist, Leninist left.
- [09:03]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. So developing this a little more. So in addition to doing a lot of the fact checking work that you describe, a kind of parallel track that gets slowly developed throughout the book is trying to examine the kind of underlying structure of the type of scholarship that you're trying to argue against. You argue that there are kind of particular forms of thinking that lead one to, say, defend Stalin or the Moscow trials. I'm wondering if you could speak to going into this project, that part of the book that interested you in trying to understand what pulls somebody in this direction or what kind of thinking is in play to kind of try and make those arguments work.
- [09:49]
Douglas Green
Yeah. So I think one part of the reason, like why a lot of before I get to Fur and Company is when the trials happen, the people who were defending them were members of the Communist parties, both in the Soviet Union and its allied parties abroad. And it was very important to understand why those party members responded in that way. And I do think probably at a certain level, at the very high echelons, there probably was a level of cynicism involved. But I think for your rank and file cadre member in France, the US or wherever, I actually think they genuinely believed it and they really wanted to explain, like, why there had been like, all like these problems in the Soviet Union, why it was under threat. And this idea of this vast Trotsky conspiracy allied with Hitler and the Japanese seemed to provide those answers. And interestingly, this is like it. It ends up being almost a type of conspiratorial mindset that really kind of seeped into a lot of these parties and really got its full blown manifestation with the Moscow trials. Because you could look at the Soviet Union and certainly there were achievements from the five Year Plans and industrialization, but there were a lot of deep problems from collectivization, from the inner party bureaucracy, et cetera. And this conspiracy theory tended to provide an explanation for why those things exist. Like were besieged, you know, there are enemies within. And according to this narrative, this conspiracy was not just in the Soviet Union, but Trotskyism was like an enemy of people's movements abroad. So you would find the Communist Party members in the US would pretty much view Trotskyists with the same disdain as they would a Nazi or a fascist or some other reactionary. And it just became a catch all. And for them, Trotskyism wasn't a rival political current with political ideas that you could debate, accept or refute. It was a criminal conspiracy. And that type of mentality has to greater or lesser degrees still been a part of Marxism Leninism. Because if you go to the last, say 10, 15 years, there has been a resurgence of various forms of Marxism Leninism here in the US there's been a growth of the Communist Party usa and in various parts of the world there has been, you know, Communist parties that were formerly aligned with the Soviet Union are still significant forces, whether we're talking in places in Europe or South America. And this meant this view of Trotskyism and this kind of conspiratorial mindset is something that has still existed in them. And when you talk to a lot of them about the Soviet Union, that still is like, oh, Trotsky was in league with the Nazis. And I do think you find certain people who tried to develop this into an actual form of scholarship or pseudo scholarship as it were, like fur Bland, Martins and Lacerdo, because they want to actually ground this with some kind of materialism. Because that's the thing. Stalinism claims to be Marxist, it claims to be materialist, heir to the Enlightenment and rationalism and all of that stuff. And some members of that movement do try and you know, want to actually defend that, you know, that narrative. But if, but once you like look at it very closely, it falls apart with logical fallacies. It's non materialist. It's almost it's almost religious in its view. And I do think, I guess to end is, I think a lot of the attraction to this narrative is kind of a form of irrationalism because a lot of people who are attracted to Marxism, Leninism, they reject, correctly anti Communism. They say, we've been lied to about Stalinism and Stalin all our lives. So therefore Stalin did nothing wrong. They want to defend that. These people, the Lucertos and the Furs, they provide them the ammunition for it, or they at least confirm their existing beliefs. And it's almost like, you know, whatever comes out of the Vatican, it's believed by the stalwart Catholics and it's the same kind of mentality that you find there. So it's not really like a, you know, developing like historical tradition or historiography with different camps. This is more like the catechism of the faith that's getting passed down. And unfortunately, as long as segments of the left embrace this kind of rationalism, I think they're not going to be truly Marxist. I don't think they're going to truly understand the past or be able to plan for a better future. I think.
- [14:41]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. So jumping off of that introduction, bringing up someone who we've discussed before a couple episodes ago, Domenico Lacerto, the Italian Marxist historian, and he wrote a kind of infamous book on Stalin that was actually recently translated just a couple years ago. It remains, I think, probably his most controversial book. But you take that book as well as some of his other claims kind of head on to try and wrestle with his defense of Stalin and Stalinism as well as a critique of Trotsky that he develops. And you lay it out in a way that I think really helped me understand what he's looking at. So you kind of point out that he sees Stalin as this kind of hard headed realist who admittedly could. It was a difficult pill to swallow, but Stalin was willing to do what needed to be done to create this transition to socialism. And if there was some violence along the way, that's just what we had to do. Whereas he seems to see Trotsky as this sort of more ethereal messianic figure who might be attractive to some, but doesn't have the sort of concrete, grounded practicality that Stalin had. I'm wondering if you could, you know, develop this binary he has a bit and why it leads him to defend Stalin and critique Trotsky.
- [16:08]
Douglas Green
Sure. Just before I answer that, I just want to add Lacerdo is probably the most intellectually serious person I discuss because he's written extensively on Hegel, Nietzsche, liberalism, and a multitude of other subjects that I think are worth reading. And he comes out of this long tradition of Western Marxism. Fellow travelers of the Communist parties who could make genuine theoretical or historical contributions, whether we talk about Eric Hobsbawn, Albert Sabal, Georges Lukasz, whoever you want to name, but they also had very strange, if not wrong, views on the Soviet Union. So for Lacerto, his whole methodology is rooted in a reading from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, where revolutions are fated to go through a phase of messianism, you know, so the French Revolution goes through, like Jacobinism, this utopian explosion of energy. But he thinks the revolutions, they eventually have to shift to a stage of realism and stability. So that means you have Thymedor and Bonaparte, you have to be more conservative. And he thinks, as the expression goes, when a revolution is like Saturn eating its own children, that's a necessary stage of any revolution. And so it's not just the French Revolution that that applies to, but it's the Russian Revolution, it's the Chinese Revolution, et cetera. So he argues that in 1917 there was this egalitarian, utopian, messianic energy represented above all by Leon Trots. But eventually, when the revolution kind of has succeeded, defeated like the counter revolutionaries in the civil war, it's necessary for the revolution to stabilize, to put aside all these messianic and utopian hopes and have a more conservative, realist possibility. And Stalin represents that. And interestingly, this also applies to how Lacerta views China. He sees Mao as like the utopian egalitarian and Deng as the realist. So he's very. Laerto is actually a very hardline defender of contemporary China. But the thing with the Soviet Union is lto believes that Trotsky could not accept this dialectic of Saturn, this need for realism. So therefore, Trotsky accused Stalin of betraying the revolution with his policies of selling them out. And this led to a fratricidal, as he calls it, Bolshevik civil war, where Trotsky's plotting, trying to overthrow Stalin and finds himself in league with. With Hitler and others. And interestingly, when Lacerta makes these arguments, unlike everyone else I cover, he does not rely upon the confessions of the Moscow trials, although his conclusions all end up being the same thing. He has other bits of evidence that I do deal with. So ultimately it comes down to Lacerdo, is he could, you know, you could technically say for Lacerdo that all the charges of the Moscow trials are rubbish, but that's not the main issue for him, it's who represents like historical necessity. And for Lacerdo that means that it's Stalin. And since Stalin represents the needs of the revolution, it doesn't matter if Trotsky was or was not in league with Hitler. It matters that he is a detriment to this revolution. He was wrong. So in that sense, that's kind of like where he comes down. It's a political decision ultimately, since it doesn't actually rely upon the trial confessions, et cetera, at the end of the day, although he does try and buttress it with some kind of pseudo evidence and what have you. I do think, when you kind of get down to it, is this political defense of Stalin is like this necessary realism for the Soviet Union. And I deal with this in the Stalinism. And the dialect of Saturn means he really can't grasp a lot of these backward, themidorian or outright counter revolutionary aspects of Stalin that ultimately betrayed socialism. And I don't think he engages with what Trotsky representative, his alternative program, et cetera.
- [20:17]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, continuing with Lacerdo, you bring up a few other figures, many of whom have been critical of Stalin, Trotsky among them, but also you talk about, for example, Nikita Khrushchev, who came after Stalin, as well as Hannah Arendt and her work on totalitarianism. And one thing that you point out is that while it's true that all of these figures bring critiques of Stalin to bear, they come at them from very different positions. They bring in different forms, frameworks and assumptions. And so they're coming at Stalin from a different direction or from different directions. And as a result, you argue that Lacerdo sort of misses the uniqueness of Trotsky's position. Instead, it kind of gets molded into this larger attack on Stalinism in that kind of unique position or program that Trotsky would have been offering up as a critique kind of gets lost. I'm wondering if you could speak to that as well.
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Douglas Green
I think what Lacerda does is what Stalin actually accused Trotsky, or what Trotsky said that Stalin did, which was amalgams, putting diverse forces together as kind of like this common front, this criminal conspiracy. So this was done in the Moscow trial. So what Lacerto is doing is saying pretty much like all these critiques of Stalin as a totalitarian, et cetera, from Trotsky, from Hannah Arendt, from Khrushchev, from others. They're all kind of like this amalgam together. And it's interesting, like totalitarianism, which Trotsky does use in Various works in the 30s, when Trotsky's using it in the 30s, it's very much an open term. A lot of different people are using it. You have Mussolini using it. You have Winston Churchill, members of the Frankfurt School in Trotsky. And its meaning is up in the air. And it means different things. So when Trotsky's using it, he doesn't mean the same thing as what will happen after World War II. So after World War II, you have the Cold War and you have this real development in the United States of basically an ideological arsenal of weapons to use against the Soviet Union and communism more broadly, one of which is totalitarianism. And Hannah Rent is kind of part of this codification when she writes her famous work on the origins of totalitarianism after the war, where it's very much part of this Cold War anti Communism. And it doesn't mean the same thing as Trotsky, because Trotsky, in his analysis, doesn't look at the Soviet Union as this frozen society where there's no contradictions, where you kind of get with the Cold War, totalitarianism and Arendt. So it's very different there. And also Trotsky is still calling for a revolution against the bureaucracy and socialism and all of that, something obviously Hannah Arendt is not doing. And Khrushchev is another different character. He is condemning Stalin, but he. And he isn't condemning Stalin in a Trotsky way, because he actually defends Stalin's fight against Trotsky in the twenties, because he defends socialism in one country. And when Khrushchev condemns Stalin's repressions, it's against loyal party members. He doesn't really care about the Perch Trotskyists or Bukharin or others like that, because one thing Khrushchev is doing is he's making a political intervention. His speech is important to read because he's trying to. He is trying to cast out parts of the Stalin legacy. But he still wants to maintain the legitimacy of the system that Stalin established, which is why he has to defend the Stalin's program in the twenties, socialism and country and all of that. And that's why he condemned Stalin's attack against loyal party members, because these are the party members. He wants to support him as Troussev wants to basically reform Stalinism. Because one thing you have with Khrushchev is the basic structures of the Soviet Union remain in place. You have social and contrary. You have the ruling bureaucracy and all of that, but you really don't have the type of mass arbitrary repressions that existed under Stalin with Khrushchev because the bureaucrats didn't like that, because they didn't want to be purged under Khrushchev. So these are like very different interventions. Basically you have Trotsky, who's in exile in the 30s. Totalitarianism is a term up in the air. And he's trying to provide a materialist, scientific analysis of the Soviet Union as well as emotion on all of that. And totalitarianism does form a part of it, but it's also in pursuit of a project of socialist renewal. With Hannah Arendt, you have someone who's pretty much at the cutting edge of Cold War anti communism, which is her analysis is part of this idea that totalitudism is a frozen society of a ruling party elite, et cetera, that's completely enslaving everybody. And with Khrushchev you have an attempt to reform the Soviet Union by condemning some of its excesses under Stalin. So these are very different analyses. Yes, there are a criticism of Stalinism in all of them, but like you said, it doesn't mean they mean the same thing. Like I criticize Stalin, so does Adolf Hitler. That doesn't mean we're the same person or we have the same views on it. You know, you can't do that. You actually do have to look at the specificity of what is being done. And you know, with Lacerdo and many other of these neo Stalinists, they, they tend to really like doing amalgams. And if, oh, you criticize Stalin, you're just like Hitler. Well, it's like, no, we're not. There's specificity to it and there are different class forces involved in all of that which you can't erase when you deal with these questions.
- [25:56]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah.
- [25:56]
Moving along to the next person, you discuss one, Ludo Martins, actually jumping right off that kind of accusation you were just talking about. One thing that gets developed, especially in the 1930s and especially in relation to discussions of the Spanish Civil War, was the theory or accusation that there was a sort of Trotskyist fascist alliance that was in play throughout the 1930s, which is kind of impressive, almost especially as if you read about Trotsky's activity and his writing throughout that period. He wrote consistently warning about the fascist threat, wrote extensively trying to analyze and dissect it, offer kind of a class based analysis of it, offer up ideas for how to combat it. So how do people like Martin's come to the idea that there was some sort of Trotskyist Fascist alliance in play throughout this period. And what kind of work is that argument doing?
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Douglas Green
It is kind of impressive that that's done. And just because to take the other side, if you read like Hitler and the Nazis, they were pretty consistent about not wanting to work with Jews. And Trotsky is a communist Jew who, like you said, is actually developing strategies to combat fascism. But I think Martin's and I basically would say all the others would more or less agree with this. There was this idea that Trotsky was this opportunist semi Menshevik who couldn't stand the fact that he was ousted from power and from his opportunism, that Trotsky in exile was willing to do whatever possible to overthrow Stalin and get back into the seat of power. And he was basically willing to make these deals with foreign powers, with the British, the Polish, and of course, you know, the fascists in Germany, Italy and Japan. And this is kind.
- [27:55]
Stephen Dozeman
This.
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Douglas Green
This idea that kind of comes and I. One thing you kind of saw with like Communist Party members in the 30s, particularly in France, they remembered like the history of the French Revolution, and they were members of the original revolutionary movement who went over to the other side and like, well, if that happened there with these people like Danton or whomever, maybe someone like Trotsky who is the great hero of the civil war, that happened as well. And that's kind of this idea because in the 30s it was, you know, the main opponents of the Soviet Union were the fascist parties in the fascist states. And Trotsky is condemning Stalin. So don't they have a common interest? And isn't Trotsky just this rascal opportunist, you know, who just is out for power? And Martin's kind of develops this idea that Trotsky, you know, was involved with like, military people, that he was involved with, like wreckers in the economy and all these other and terrorist forces who killed Kirov and others. And it is kind of irrational, but in their view, opponents of the Soviet Union, you know, are basically a criminal conspiracy. And you are no better than a fascist because you are objectively guilty. Because if Stalin represents the forces of history, of communism, and if you're opposed to Stalin, you're opposed to communism and the force of history, and the only. The main people doing that are Hitler and Mussolini, and Trotsky has gone over to their side. Yeah.
- [29:30]
Stephen Dozeman
Another argument you bring up is an accusation that I've seen pop up even in contemporary organizing work, and that is the accusation of Trotskyist organizations and Groups as wreckers of proper left oriented parties. I discussed this at length with Brian D. Palmer a couple years ago when talking about James Cannon in the 1930s. So I was kind of interested in this accusation partly because I just keep seeing it pop up throughout. So I'm wondering if you could unpack what the accusation actually is and why it keeps on coming up throughout history.
- [30:08]
Douglas Green
Yeah, well, with the Soviet Union, I'll start there is when they had the five year plans and industrialization, et cetera, there were a lot of economic problems. You know, there were machines that broke down, there was, you know, shortages, bottlenecks, et cetera. And part of this was actually the fact that the Stalin leadership was really rushing for this massive industrial undertaking and they wanted to complete it as quickly as possible. So they were basically taking peasants out of the countryside, giving them rudimentary training and throwing them into jobs. And people who aren't trained well, they're going to make mistakes and break things. If you build things quickly, you're probably not going to be the most rigorous in your safety standards. And this led to a lot of problems in the Soviet economy. And there was this. And as this kind of became apparent, this Stalin leadership basically would say there's conscious wrecking going on. There are people who are trying to make sure the factories aren't running, that things aren't getting where they're supposed to and everything. So there's wrecking from these Trotskyite agents. Now to be clear, if you read some of the primary sources, there were people who were not friends of the Soviet Union from overthrown classes and outright counter revolutionaries who were trying to screw up things like what is it? There was this John Scott who wrote behind the Urals, an American living in the Soviet Union, but he mentions that this was actually not an organized thing. This is like individuals doing it. But Stalin said this was part of this wider conspiracy and this kind of got transferred out to the whole Moscow line communist movement. So whether we are talking France, the United States or Spain, there would be small Trotsky leaning parties that would exist and that would disagree with the Moscow line party. So whether we're talking James Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party or the PUM in Spain, which is technically not Trotskyist, but definitely like a lot of Trotsky's ideas, they would disagree with Stalin's policies and the line of the parties there and for the party leaderships in those countries, this is saying you're splitting the workers movement, you are counter revolutionaries. Which meant that even when these policies in the United States, the Communist party by the mid-1930s was pursuing alliance with the democrats and the labor bureaucracy, basically not acting like communists. And if you were in a Trotskyist organization opposing that, well, you're, you know, you're trying to split our movement, you're trying to stop us from succeeding, even if it's a principle Marxist criticism. And in Spain you have the Communist Party who's basically during the civil war, is trying to roll back revolution that's broken out throughout the country and protect private property, the bourgeoisie. And you have the PUM who are opposed to that. And therefore in the mind of the Communist Party leadership, well, you're an agent of fascism. You're splitting our movement. You need to be destroyed. You're the fifth column in our side. You're wrecking us. So it's basically the way wrecking ends up being used in those situations is a broad way to basically condemn any criticism because there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the policies of the Communist Party USA or the Communist Party of Spain in the 30s. But the way wrecking ends up being used is to condemn any criticism of splitting movements. Even if, like, you know, you're pursuing an outright counter revolutionary policy and you condemn that. That's not wrecking, that's actually trying to expose a policy that is not going to lead to socialism or communism.
- [34:03]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. The next person you discuss is someone you already mentioned briefly, Grover Furr, picking up this idea of this kind of worldwide global Trotskyist conspiracy that's trying to thwart or throw off world revolution. One thing that's interesting about Fur is he acknowledges that evidence of such a conspiracy is sometimes difficult to find. But instead of admitting to this gap in the evidence, he turns the absence of evidence into a sort of evidence proof that they are just that good at covering their tracks or that deeply embedded. I'm wondering if you could speak to this kind of weird inversion of evidence or what he calls evidence.
- [34:53]
Douglas Green
It's kind of amazing because he admits quite openly that there is no evidence of Trotsky being in league with the Germans, the Japanese, outside of the Soviet Union. Nothing, nothing exists there. And he also admits that the evidence that the only real evidence that he uses, and I use scare quotes here for evidence like confessions of the Moscow trials. But Fur basically argues that that is actually sign of Trotsky's success because he says that Trotsky, Bukharin and these other Bolsheviks who were purged by Stalin and you know, in the Moscow trials, they also had a long history working in the underground in the Bolshevik party before the revolution. So they knew the art of conspiracy. They knew how to like, organize clandestinely to make newspapers and all this kind of stuff and that they didn't lose that, that ability. So by the 20s and 30s, when these forces find themselves in opposition to Stalin, they put those type of conspiratorial activities in place. So they make sure when they're in league with, with Germany and Japan, to not leave any written evidence, to not, you know, nothing, nothing is, is left behind. And this is a sign of proof because a successful conspiracy in fursmi would leave absolutely no proof at all. And. But this also leaves a question. Well, it's like, how can you prove something that doesn't have any evidence? Well, the thing is, also maybe let's. Even if Trotsky and company didn't leave evidence, the Germans were actually meticulous record keepers. They were very. That was like, Germany was very notorious for that. Didn't they need to keep receipts for the money that they were giving Trotsky? Didn't the Japanese need to, supposedly the British were paying Trotsky, like a lot of money from 1926 onward. Didn't they have any of that? And a lot of these countries are occupied by the ally, by the Soviet Union after World War II, particularly like Poland and Germany. Surely there would have been evidence in those archives that they would have found. And actually the Nuremberg trials tried leading Nazis for their crimes against the Soviet Union. Why weren't all the Moscow trials stuff as part of that indictment, considering the Soviet Union had justice there? And the point I'm trying to make here is Fur kind of tries to dodge this issue by saying, you know, you're trying to five a smoking gun. You know that, and we're not going to find a smoking gun. And he sounds like people like David Irving, the infamous Holocaust denier. There's no order for Hitler saying the Holocaust is going to happen, so therefore it didn't happen. Well, no, no one's asking for a smoking gun. We're asking logically, if you were to have a conspiracy to, say, commit genocide against the Jews, what would you realistically need? You need training camps. You need like train schedules, building programs and all this kind of apparatus and mobilization of resources to kill all the Jews. You would need all of that. And we have all that evidence. There's a lot of great historians who've done that work. And we can ask the same thing for Fur if you were to have a vast conspiracy of these Trotskyite fascists Where are the agents? Where's the paper trail? Where's anything materially to back it up? And he doesn't offer anything, which means he ends up relying on the Moscow trial confessions, which we can certainly get into why those are not reliable, but also the fact that it means he ends up in this very bizarre position where without any evidence, he just says, well, if evidence existed, surely it would exist, or it wouldn't exist. You know, it's like it's bizarre. Which means he ends up being like Donald Rumsfeld. Well, yeah, it's like they're good at hiding the weapons of mass destruction. Of course we're not going to find it, which means the best evidence for fur is the fact that there is no evidence, which means I can prove to you that Darth Vader, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and Captain Picard are all real. You know, there's no evidence for that, but, you know, that's the best evidence for it. So it's a completely form of irrationalism, conspiratorial logic that he somehow twists and unfortunately bamboozles some hapless fools about it.
- [39:00]
Stephen Dozeman
Yes. Speaking of evidence, when he's not arguing that the absence of evidence is itself evidence, what he does submit as a legitimate source of evidence is the Moscow trials, which we've already mentioned. I don't think even Lacerdo does this, if I'm remembering correctly. But Fur seems to think that these trials that are, in retrospect considered kind of just appear for show sort of movement. He thinks that confessions drawn out during this period of time count as legitimate. I'm wondering if you could speak to how he kind of tries to justify this.
- [39:43]
Douglas Green
Sure. So just very quickly recap. There were three major trials in the Soviet Union in the 1930s of former leading Bolsheviks who all confessed to fantastic crimes of being in league with Trotsky, Hitler, and the Japanese to destroy the Soviet Union, overthrow Stalin, and restore capitalism. And what made them so fantastic is the defendants all confessed to their crimes, and seemingly that was legitimate, especially to a lot of, you know, Communist Party members. Well, the fact is, Ferb says that, you know, that they confess and there was no evidence that they were tortured, you know, or coerced in other ways. And he goes out of his way to deny that, you know, certain people were, like, beaten, et cetera. But the. But the fact is, for the trials themselves, it wouldn't actually make sense for them to be physically tortured, because these are show trials where people are going to be put on trial, you know, because. So if they're seen with like, you know, black eyes and what have you that would kind of undermine the purpose. But they lived in a society where torture, coercion and mass arrests of innocent people was widely practiced. And this can be found in declassified Soviet archives by J. Arch Getty and Road to Terror. And the Soviet leadership was well aware of this. You can read Molotov's memoirs called Molotov Remembers. He was basically the number two guy. He's basically like, yeah, we mass arrested innocent people, but it's okay so long as we get the guilty ones. So this was well known. And even if these people were not physically tortured, they would have been well aware that it was widely practiced and in many cases their families were threatened. Fur denies all of this, and he thinks that they freely confess to their crimes. Now there were instances of secret trials like of the Red army leaders like Tutchajewski, who was physically beaten and his confession actually had blood stains on it. But that the reason why that was kind of allowed in the Stalin system is that was a secret trial, like they were not publicly shown. And Fur denies that that was, you know, that there were any blood stains on that confession. He does everything possible to basically wash that away. And he basically, the thing about the trials is the confessions. They confess to all these fantastic crimes, but there's no corroboration or physical evidence. So the example I use in the text is, say I arrest somebody and they're acute and I accuse them of being a serial killer, and they confess to me of their crime. Now if they are to show me where the bodies are buried, that's corroboration of their confession. If that person cannot show me where the bodies are buried, it basically, it raises the immediate question that someone is being coerced or, you know, somehow made to incriminate themselves. And Fur kind of ignores the fact that no corroboration for any of these confessions was found. We just left with their word. And it's. It's. But the thing also with Fur, it's also he kind of gets himself into a real conjury because there were mass repressions in the Soviet Union that were even acknowledged under Stalin, but it was actually blamed on the secret police chief for Yezov in 1937, who really kind of ramped it up. And Fur kind of basically says, well, Yezhov was actually in league with Stalin, I'm sorry, with Hitler and Trotsky, which means he gets into this very weird thing. It was like, so you're saying that Yezhov, who is the secret police chief, according to one of these trials, Mass arrested innocent people, but that doesn't apply to the people on trial. And I should add, another secret police chief was also accused of being in league with Trotsky. So the people who are leading the secret police were supposedly enemies of the people during these trials, but they're somehow. The trials are not like those are not innocent people, but the others are. So he gets into this weird quandary where he's contradicting his own narrative. So suddenly these. These conspirators are diabolical and. And surrendering their comrades, but supposedly they're all in league with each other. It doesn't make sense. So in order to defend this narrative, he gets into, like, conspiracies within conspiracies. The example I use is basically like, when telemac theory was kind of being really questioned that the earth was at the center of the universe, People kind of develop models to kind of really defend it until the theory became so untenable, they just abandoned the theory. Fur is at that stage where he's just going to defend the theory and he's never going to abandon his defense of Stalin. So basically, he wants to blame all the repressions on Yezov and not Stalin, which also means that Stalin is both this, you know, this innocent, powerless figure, but also able to overthrow his enemy at the appropriate time. It's very strange narrative, and it really just kind of gives you, like, an idea of, like, you know, a conspiratorial history of the Soviet Union under. Under Stalin that you get from Ferrari. So, yeah, basically the point is he kind of ignores the widespread facts about, you know, mass repression of innocent people in the Soviet Union, of course, confessions, and he develops this elaborate narrative to kind of explain it a way that falls apart on pretty much a surface level examination, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah.
- [45:13]
Stephen Dozeman
The final person you look at is one Bill Bland, who offers up a kind of vision or idea of Marxist theory, particularly as applied to the nature of history. So in your view, what Bland does is he extends the kind of dialectic of history and this kind of method of trying to understand the trajectory of history. And he turns it into. You describe it as being a sort of almost a theological approach where there is kind of this orthodox view of how to read history and how to interpret where it's going. And the point is to kind of maintain orthodoxy, maintain the faith, as it were. I'm wondering if you could speak to what you see Bland doing in terms of taking, you know, Some basic ideas within Marxism about how to think about history and maybe kind of trying to almost over solidify them.
- [46:11]
Douglas Green
I would say that with Bland, he comes out of Hojism, which was basically aligned with the Albanian People's Republic under Enver Hoxha, that was really much a stalwart defender of Stalin Orthodoxy, including against, you know, China, because Hoxha didn't like the fact that Mao said that Stalin was 70% good but 30% bad. Hoxha didn't want any negatives. And with Bland, you kind of get that because Hoxism really rejects the secret speech of Khrushchev, even though the basic structures of the Soviet Union are left in place, et cetera. They don't like the fact that the faith was challenged. And the analogy I use is that Bland is basically like a Latin Mass Catholic to. So basically in the 60s, there were like these kind of like reforms of the Catholic Church where they stopped saying the Mass in Latin and everything. And a lot of hardline traditionalist Catholics, they didn't like this. They thought it made their rituals profane. It took the sacredness, the mystery out of it. And Bland is kind of like that because he likes this old school Orthodoxy where we know where history is leading completely, where the General Secretary provides the way forward. And suddenly you're saying that all of that is wrong. You're questioning that. And he wants to get back to this Latin mass Stalinism. So he basically also develops this idea that basically Stalin did no wrong. But also at the same time, he gets into some. Stalin is constantly fighting various conspiracies in the Soviet Union. So his view of history, it's not really a class struggle anymore. It's not, you know, fighting within the bureaucracy. It's conspiracies against Stalin. And I should add, for Bland, Stalin isn't, you know, this all powerful dictator or what have you. He's basically powerless. He's the suffering Christ for the Soviet Union. Interestingly, Bland gets into this point where Stalin had excised really no power in the Soviet, including in the Cominternore, where he actually says that Stalin was opposed to the Popular Front and it was put in by fascist agents like Grigori Dimitrov, which is absurd if you know anything about Dimitrov, who had been actually arrested by the Nazis. So Bland basically sees, you know, the trials as almost like a religious experience, because the people who confess, you know, they're saying, you know, that they understand the. Their duty to the state, to history, and that they recognize that all crimes need to be solved. They need to do their duty. And that's the thing. Once you recognize the wisdom of the general secretary, that he's leading us forward, that Stalin is this saintly figure, this godlike figure. In fact, in one interview, Bland says Stalin made no mistakes at all. In fact, almost calls him a divine figure, which is ironic considering Albania was the first state to declare itself officially atheist. But Bland is really putting, like, his view of history. It's a religious view right out of the Middle Ages, right out of, like, traditional Catholicism. And I don't know if Bland came out of a Catholic background, but it's what it sounds like to me. And it's very far from Marxism. It certainly can solidify cadre, but, you know, it's also just a way to completely ignore evidence, the material history, opening of archives, these real, genuine crimes. And it also is a way to, like, ignore, like, the exactly existing class struggles that have existed. So I guess I would conclude by saying that Bland is basically. And Hojism more generally is all is basically a religious interpretation of Soviet history, particularly Stalin, where Stalin is basically Christ on earth.
- [49:53]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. In the conclusion of the book or near the end, you offer up kind of a counter. A lot of the book has revolved around the Moscow trials, and you offer kind of a counterinterpretation of why the Moscow trials happened. Beyond, like, the specifics of your kind of counter explanation, I'd like to ask what do you feel distinguishes your interpretation or your method that gives you kind of a different explanation? Because it's not just a matter. It feels to me that it's not just a matter of some of your interlocutors offering up interpretation A, you offer up interpretation B, because you've got a couple different facts on hand that they maybe didn't have access to. Instead, there's kind of a different way of thinking about facts, thinking about how they kind of add up to this larger narrative that is kind of how you read the trajectory of history. I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to what you see going on differently in terms of how you try and take the insights of the Marxist tradition and apply them to either historical or current events.
- [51:04]
Douglas Green
Sure. So I guess first to say, is there for the Moscow trials, there tend to be, like, two broad camps. So you would have, like, the official Soviet narrative under Stalin where, you know, there's these wreckers led by Trotsky and we defeat them and, you know, the trials are exposing them. There's that camp. Obviously, I don't agree with that. There's also the anti communist camp where Stalin is this all powerful, maniacal Sith lord type dictator who's crushing all opposition to, you know, established totalitarian communism. And I think that's also wrong because I think both of these type of explanations, the, you know, the Stalinists and the anti communists, they share like an underlying methodology. It's based in irrationalism, it's based in almost this religious type view where, you know, for the Stalinists, you know, Stalin is an angel. For the anti communists, Stalin is a demon. And you know, it's either, you know, Stalin is the work of historical necessity or Stalin as the bolt from the blue, this evil force. So what I try to do is to look at obviously people like Trotsky and other Marxist historians, but also look at like what came out of the Soviet archives, what came out of other historians who are not bound to this kind of hardcore anti communism which has its own blind spots that prevents an actual rational, materialist view of history. And I kind of came up with the four big questions. So there's the struggle between center and periphery in the Soviet Union, there's a struggle over foreign policy that goes back and forth, the preventive civil war between Stalin and the various oppositions, and also the fact that this is something that a lot of people just aren't willing to accept. There were parts of the trial, the purges in general, where things just got completely out of hand and no one was in control of it. When you have these mass arrests and people are fingering other people, that's not being. Stalin's not controlling that, no one's controlling that. And that's also part of history that we have to understand. It's not this well orchestrated plan where someone's pulling the strings. And that's part of the thing I argue against in the book. It's like sometimes history's not put together that well. There's all this kind of contingencies we have to take into account. And that's the thing you don't get from the Stalinists is they think it's all like this, master puppeteers playing it. And the anti communists think the same thing. And this is a conspiratorial logic because they don't see these material forces that are at work. They don't see the structures, socioeconomic systems of power and what have you. They see puppet masters and the sheeple, someone's pulling the strings, someone's manipulating this, this, this, for this cosmic struggle between good and evil. And I want to reject that because I hope I also show in the book. Like, I mean, I'm not a Stalin fan, but I don't think the anti communists have Stalin right at all. He isn't this all powerful dictator. It's not to say he doesn't have power, but it's not the way. It's not like a supervillain twirling his mustache, so to speak. And I think when we understand history, we have to reject irrationalism, conspiratorialism, which you find in both the anti communists and the Stalinists. And you have to ground yourself in a materialist analysis, in a rationalist view. And I think Trotsky is a foundational piece of that. But he's not the only person I do look at the revisionist Soviet historians, the Soviet archives, et cetera. And I hope you know that there's some validity to what I say, because, you know, if you challenge me, that's fine. You know, we can rationally debate that. But I think with the Stalinist and the anti communist, you're not dealing with rational views of these events. And that's what I hoped. I tried to do with my explanation of the trials.
- [54:45]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, developing this a little more. So the Marxist tradition. One thing that I think is really often underappreciated about it is it has this incredibly robust critical attempt to kind of demystify certain aspects of history and society. So thinking about not just the way capitalism or class society operates, but thinking about the way it can kind of often mystify itself in certain ideological obfuscations. And then going forward beyond Marx, you've got, you know, this whole 20th century of critical theory, critical social theory and philosophy, trying to understand, you know, not just the underlying economic core, but the ways in which that economic core kind of hides itself behind culture and all that is to say that you would think that people immersed in this Marxist tradition would be in some way kind of inoculated a bit against conspiratorial thinking. And yet what your book shows is that just because you can, at least in a superficial way, be committed to a Marxist view of history or society, you can still kind of fall into these conspiratorial forms of thinking. So I'm curious if, for people on the left, people committed to Marxism, is there some sort of intellectual or emotional work that this sort of thinking, such as kind of diving in to defend Stalin, is doing for them? Is there, like, a particularly unique pull that conspiracies might have for people committed, at least in a superficial way, towards building a socialist future?
- [56:31]
Douglas Green
I mean, I think Stalin like the conspiracies, you know, that. Let me say this, like, for Communist Party militants in the 30s and many who still defend Stalin today, he represented the avatar, the, you know, this leading figure who is bringing them to the future. And if you were opposed to that, you know, you were opposed to ending exploitation, oppression, getting to a better society. And for so many of them, they could, they could basically ignore any criticism of Stalin because they believe that firmly in it, because they saw that future being built in the Soviet Union. Now, in certain senses, yes, the bourgeoisie do lie about, you know, the Soviet Union, etc. But there were genuine crimes and bad stuff going on there that the Communist Party militants couldn't. Weren't willing to confront, at least not in any large scale until, say, 56. And conspiratorial thinking was kind of their way to get around this because they could just say, you know, all this bad stuff. It's actually not Stalin. He's trying to defend the revolution, it's Trotsky, these records, etc. And for, I guess to say is for Communist Party militants, for Stalinists is conspiratorial thinking was kind of baked in there. And for, you know, I, you know, for in certain ways, Trotsky function for them the way Jews function for anti Semites as this maniacal evil force. And which is to say that, you know, the Stalin tradition is, is, despite the fact that it sometimes claims to be heirs to the Enlightenment, dips into very reactionary and backward thinking and, you know, irrationalism. And it's part of the fact that we do live in a society that does encourage that, and we're all susceptible to it to one degree or another. And I think just to kind of say is like our inoculation is to, you know, obviously collective struggle, collective organization, but also to ground ourselves in a rationalist and dialectical worldview that reason, in the Marxist sense, I think, can explain the world. And we should really develop those type of critical thinking skills. Because if we want to change the world and rationally plan things and build a better society, we need people who are conscious and not bound by irrationalism, not bound by mysticism and backward thinking, which leads to often really bad results, you know, as the Moscow trials or the Spanish Civil War purges, you know, showed. We need people who are conscious, who can understand the world, understand, you know, the struggle, you know, the class society, et cetera. And this is provided by Marxism, it's provided by Hegel, Spinoza, all of that. And I think it's important to train ourselves in that it's not necessarily going to be like a magic bullet. But I do think it's. It's a necessary thing you need to do. Because conspiracism is, you know, Stalinism is like in a certain way, an expression of that on the left, but conspiracism is more prevalent on, like the far right. And that's something we need to combat. Because if those type of ideas, those type of thinking is able to fester and take root, then we don't have objective reality. Then we just have whatever made up crap that people are spewing. And you kind of see this right now in so many ways with people just spewing the most asinine conspiracy theories and getting away with it, whether it's on Covid or Trump or what have you. And we don't need that. We need people who are rationally informed, who can rationally act and rationally change the world. And to do that, we need facts, we need materialism, we need to understand the world as it really is. And conspiracism on the far right is a hindrance to that. And on the Stalinist left, it's also a hindrance. It's also more tragic in a certain way from the Stalinist left because so many of those militants who join those parties, I don't think they set out to purge people or to be hard, you know, to defend crimes. They wanted to change the world for the better, but because they absorbed that worldview, they ended up betraying so much of what they set out to do. And that's the tragedy in some ways of Stalinism. And I don't. And I think if we want to go forward and not repeat those tragedies, then we need to understand, like, where it came from, what its results were and hopefully so we cannot do that again. And we can actually really change the world for the better in the future.
- [61:13]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, I think that's an excellent note to end on. So as a final question, I always like to ask guests, what, if anything, are you working on now? What can we look forward to from you in the next year or two?
- [61:26]
Douglas Green
Well, the big thing I'm trying to work on now is I have a Finnish manuscript called Ecce Duce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benito Mussolini and the Philosophy of Fascism, which basically I'm looking at Nietzsche's influence on Mussolini and a host of fascists. And I'm trying to find a publisher for it. Hopefully in the near future I'll find one, but I will let you know when that's out. And we can hopefully talk about that again.
- [61:51]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, that sounds excellent. So, in the meantime, Doug Green, thank you so much for coming back.
- [61:57]
Douglas Green
Thank you so much for having me.