Losurdo Domenico. Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend

Independent Publishers, 2020. — 340 p.In Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend, Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, on whom he claimed it is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit all communism. Opposed to the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, Losurdo criticised the concept of totalitarianism, especially in the works of Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper and Ernst Nolte, among others. Losurdo argued that totalitarianism was a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and that applying it to the political sphere required an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes and the Soviet Union and other socialist states in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.
For Losurdo, the ferment of authoritarianism in the communist movement is to be found more on the libertarian side of the communist utopia than in the reformist desire to build a state. Losurdo described his work on Stalin as a history of Stalin's image and not a biography or political history of the system with which his name is commonly associated. According to Losurdo, questioning the clichés of anti-Stalinism and Stalinism, including in the Communist ranks since 1956, required returning to the substance of the question of the evaluation of Soviet history from 1922 to 1953 and even beyond, since the categories of anti-Stalinism and Stalinism have been generalized to the study of other socialist states ruled by communist parties and other personalities such as Mao Zedong in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. For Losurdo, the study of "the black legend" was partly mixed with a rehabilitation of the personality and the statesman figure of Stalin, who is clearly distinguished from the political regime. The starting point was the observation that at the time of his death in March 1953, the image of Stalin was rather positive in the world, propaganda on both sides aside. It was the dissemination of the Khrushchev report that "precipitated the god into hell." According to Losurdo, it was a document of the internal struggle in the leadership of the party, whose credibility is none.