Introduction: A Comment on Larry Johnson’s article about ‘the sad state of US based Russian Scholars
I am posting a comment I made on Larry Johnson’s excellent website, www.sonar21.com, the sad state of US based Russian scholars. See it further down in this article. Academic Russophobes are a whole segment of the Academic and Think Tank Media Complex.
https://sonar21.com/the-sad-state-of-us-based-russian-scholars/
Robert Conquest: Historian or MI6 Propagandist?
Coincidentally one of the greatest apparent students of the Goebbels school of black propaganda, Robert Conquest, an MI6 pervayor of lies and propaganda asset pretending to be an historian, who died in 2015, was another ‘luminary’ of the Academic Russophobe Complex, along with Tim Snyder.
Along with the sources that I cite at the end of my comment to Johnson, is Grover Furr, who has spent much of his life as a Russia scholar.
Professor Grover Furr Refutes Conquest Using Original Archives
Here is a link to his brief remarks regarding Conquest.
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_conquest_obit.html
And here are some useful excerpts:
Robert Conquest has also been identified as having worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956. The Information Research Department (IRD), was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task was to combat Communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion.
A 1978 story in the The Guardian alleged that Conquest’s work there was to contribute to the so-called “black history” of the Soviet Union — in other words, fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion. After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with Secret Service support.
His book The Great Terror, a basic anti-communist text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources.
Conquest’s book was intended for presentation to “useful fools”, such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV. Conquest to this day remains, for anti-communist historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.
The article from The Guardian in 1978 documents the propaganda activities of the IRD:
David Leigh, “Death of the department that never was.” The Guardian January 27, 1978, p. 13, at
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/e/fo_deceit_unit_graun_27jan1978.html
In 1980 I interviewed Professor John Hazard of Columbia University, at the time the world expert on Soviet law. Hazard told me that people in the Soviet studies field had told him that British intelligence was still doing Conquest’s research for him.
…Conquest (Terror, 754) … makes the astounding statement that “Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.” And, further, “On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor … “. He believes that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with other rumors–a dubious procedure given the fact that �migr�s read each other’s works. Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence in any other field of history.
– Getty, “The Great Purges Reconsidered,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1979, p. 64 note 57. These passages are also quoted in Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 5 and note 12, p.222.
Already in 1979 Getty concluded:
The point of view adopted here is that the standard interpretations of the “Great Purges”, such as those by Fainsod and Conquest, are seriously flawed, cannot account for the available evidence, and are thus no longer tenable.
Larry artfully demolishes academic russophobes like Stephen Kotkin’s studied deliberate ignorance in the above cited article. To which I add my own comment here:
Kotkin is a product of Western neurotic Russophobia. In a wikipedia quote from Kotkin in his biography of Stalin, there is this quote:
Stalin was a student of Lenin and was <… an uncompromising class warrior with a complete lack of willingness to compromise with resolute ideological conviction.>>
However, this sentence describes the entire US political class, which has been screwing the middle and working class for decades!
When the modest campaign of Bernie Sanders offered reforms to help the vast majority of Americans, not only was Sanders illegally sabotaged, but the whistleblower who exposed this was murdered!
US politicians are fanatic uncompromising class warriors, mercenaries for Wall Street, the military and the Israel and other lobbies, ‘with a complete lack of willingness to compromise with resolute ideological conviction’. Nancy Pelosi herself bragged about the US as Capitalist. While she enriched herself through insider trading!
I saw another of his quotes decribing Stalin, which said that when Western government officials and politicians talk privately, they say one thing, but in public, they say something quite different. But when Stalin spoke about class struggle, he said the same thing publicly as well as privately….in other words, he was NOT a two faced, forked tongue hypocrite, like our politicians are.
I asked Deepseek AI, which tracked down the quote, here is Deepseek’s response:
Of course. That is a well-known and frequently cited observation from Professor Kotkin. You are thinking of a key passage from his biography, *Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928*.
The quote you’re describing is not a single line but a core argument Kotkin makes about Stalin’s political style and ideology. The most direct formulation of this idea appears in the Introduction of that first volume.
Here is the most relevant passage:
“For Stalin, there was no gap between ideology and realpolitik. Unlike a Western statesman, for whom ideology might be a tool of public politics, to be discarded in private, for Stalin ideology was the highest form of realpolitik. What he said in public was what he said in private. His published articles and speeches are a reliable guide to his thinking and actions.”
— Stephen Kotkin, *Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928* (Penguin Press, 2014), p. xiv (from the Introduction).
Context and Your Next Steps:
Kotkin makes this point to argue that historians should take Stalin’s prolific published works at face value. While many politicians have a public persona and a private, more cynical reality, Kotkin contends that Stalin genuinely believed Marxist-Leninist ideology provided the only correct scientific analysis of the world. Therefore, his public pronouncements were his private strategy. This is why studying Stalin’s speeches and articles is so crucial to understanding his actions.
So, the quote you’re tracking down is a central thesis of Kotkin’s interpretation of Stalin, and the passage above is its clearest expression.
Yet Kotkin implies a criticism of Stalin. In the West, lying to the public is not merely normal, it’s part of the job description.
What Do Modern Russians Think?
So, I just returned from Russia, and before I left, I had an amazing conversation with a Russian friend. His main points about Stalin:
- Brought Russia, a backward country to be a world leader
- Defeated the invasion of not just Germany, but other countries (Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Finland) in its coalition (not to mention support by US bankers and industrialists, like Henry Ford, Prescott Bush (of Bush family presidents), and future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles and future CIA founding director, Allen Dulles)
- Russian leadership in space and the weapons which are winning against Nato, with military budget 10x Russia’s, are the result of the infrastructure that Stalin planned.
One book I’d like to suggest was written by two Americans in 1946, with a forward by then Senator, Claude Pepper. But this book was written before the US Left was decimated. The Great Conspiracy Against Russia.
https://resistir.info/livros/the_great_conspiracy.pdf
And Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow during the 1930’s, a Wall Street lawyer no less, had very positive view of both Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Here is the movie, introduced by the Ambassador himself!
Kotkin and his ilk are responsible for the many petty slanders against Russia, when we could have made a better world by cooperating with Russia, which is what FDR wanted to do.
In addition, paid academic russophobe ‘presstitutes’ like Robert Conquest, and Tim Snyder, as well as former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, simply made stuff up. Like The Tonkin Gulf incident, Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Moammar Kaddafi handing out Viagra to his soldiers, Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
The Western public has been subjected to decades of lies and psychological warfare, to keep them in line, while their own standards of living sink at the expense of Wall Street and the War Machine.
My question is, when will the people finally get fed up enough to upend this System that, for example, thinks that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to illegal sanctions, and the theft of numerous Presidential elections is “Worth it”?
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