BLOOD LIES: The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Synder’s Bloodlands is False

Description

"Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder" (N.Y: 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 anticommunist 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 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 Furrbegan studying Russian language and literature as a teenager and became interested in Soviet history about a decade later. He has conducted extensive research on the Stalin period of Soviet history, on and off since the 1970s, and intensely for the past decade. Furr teaches in the English Department at Montclair State University. He has a PhD in Medieval Comparative Literature from Princeton University.