Just came across this absolute trashfire of a book by an American prof. I know these revisionist takes about WWII are a dime a dozen… but this one seems particularly egregious in its claims that Stalin masterminded World War II and that the only reason for the USSR’s success was that the stupefied Allies fell for his dastardly plan.
This level of brazen stupidity and/or disingenuousness borders on incomprehensible.
Famously the secret to the USSR’s success was the thing that destroyed half of its infrastructure and instigated a famine even after the war had ended, along with killing around 20 million of its citizens.
A college bookstore was my introduction to Robert Conquest, the former British intelligence agent who worked specifically as an anticommunist propagandist for part of the Cold War before pivoting to becoming a “historian” who claimed that more people died in the gulags than had ever even been sent to them and wrote such books as “Stalin: Breaker of Nations”. I have a vague memory that the characterization that you’re mentioning also came up, though it could have been from this book and not Conquest. At least one semester, Conquest was probably the single most-represented historian in the store, because I don’t think other individual historians had two or three of their works assigned for the same semester.
I used to have so much respect for academia, and while I know it can be good in principle and there are certainly academics who I admire (and others who I personally know and like as people but don’t always think very highly of), but overwhelmingly my takeaway from my college education is that these people are fucking fools and charlatans and critical thinking has no place in most of these spaces. It’s something that I’m very self-conscious about, honestly, because it’s such a sophomoric, philistine-sounding take, but every interaction I have reinforces this idea. Legitimately the only people who I really respected more as a group from my contact with them were the art teachers, who were cool and very supportive.
You can tell libs don’t even read this shit because Robert Conquest is the one who details the Holodomor in multiple books. In one of these books, he explains how kulaks slaughtered millions of livestock to leave their corpses rotting in fields, set fire to grain silos, sowed soil with salt, poisoned wells, and then fled the country.
He then turns around and blames these actions on Stalin for asking them to maybe possibly please share some of the land seized during the Revolution and Civil War because this drought is causing problems for everyone else.
To be clear, I was talking about the '46-'47 famine, which was caused by the events of WWII, not the '32-'33 famine (“Holodomor”), but I agree with you that it’s morbidly funny how even the most sympathetic sources give the game away that, if we are to call the famine deliberate, it was instigated by the kulaks, but their actions that were for no other purpose than destroying the food supply and productive capacity of the area are framed as heroic acts of resistance. I don’t remember the detail of them poisoning wells, but they destroyed their own equipment in some cases just to keep other people from using it.
That was my nearly immediate disillusionment with college too. I thought it was supposed to be a place where you actually learn and have deep discussion and thought, and it was just more beating you over the head with ‘right-thought’ but this time you’re paying for it so you will accept it.