Good points. The article gets better after that part, though. I wrote a very angry critique of the first bit, by the time I’d got to the same point, then tempered what I wrote after reading the rest of the article. Essentially the article finishes by arguing that Stalin was more responsible than Furr allows for but that was a good thing because he was a revolutionary and needed to be ruthless.

Could’ve been written by someone who stood by Stalin all those years even after their party fell apart on hearing Khrushchev’s speech, and was a little bit pissed off that Furr was implying that such a decades-long defence was unnecessary because Stalin didn’t actually do what he was accused of doing. Given that supporting Stalin after the Speech could’ve been an employment-ending take, I wouldn’t be surprised that my hypothetical author is a little angry lol.