The Moscow Trials As Evidence

by Grover Furr

The Moscow Trials of August, 1936, January, 1937, and March, 1938, are generally regarded as frame-ups of innocent defendants. But there has never been any evidence that this is so. The present book submits the Moscow Trials to a careful study, in the light of the large amount of primary-source materials now available from the former Soviet archives and the Leon Trotsky archives at Harvard and the Hoover Institution. It concludes that the Moscow Trials were not frame-ups of innocent men. On the they were genuine trials, in that the defendants testified as they wished to testify. The Moscow Trials testimony, therefore, is valid evidence, and the conspiracies to which the defendants pleaded guilty really did exist.

Genres: History

270 pages, Paperback

First published July 9, 2018

About the author

Grover Furr (Dr. Grover Carr Furr III) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.

He has researched and published extensive material on Soviet history (with an emphasis on the Stalin period) and on academic Sovietology from a critical perspective, for over four decades. Furr is a critic of anglophone and Western historiography of the USSR and of what he calls "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (a critique to which much of his bibliography attends).

Reviews

[Sergej Bozinovic]

Procitao jos prosle godine ali zaboravio da navedem. Kao istorijska knjiga vrlo rigorozna. Celokupna prica o zaverama uzbudljiva. Stil je borben u nedostatku bolje reči. Stiče se utisak da nervira autora koje sve gluposti su neki drugi autori i istoričari pisali. Meni je bilo to zanimljivo ali nije za svakoga.

Rigoroznost koliko god imala vrednost za ovu knjigu kao naučni rad, doduse uspori citanje posto veliki deo poglavlja su citati sa suđenja, pisma i sl. Često se i ponavljaju citati jer je namenjeno da svako poglavlje može da se čita samo za sebe, nezavisno od drugih.

[Nick Girvin]

Honestly, this would have fared better as a really long article. Furr could have cut out all of the non-translated passages from Soviet and Trotsky archives, and I also think like half of this could have been cut while still making the same point. The information itself is worth knowing if you care about this subject, but otherwise, I’d skip this. And like I’ve said, Furr’s writing is VERY tough to digest due to its dryness and weird formatting.

[Mad Medico]

Quality research as expected, but Furr’s style can be as maddening as it is forensic. But I think it’s intentional - when blasting through myths that are so well established the salient evidence should be repeated again and again. The purging of the Trotsky Archive is a particularly convincing smoking gun; I don’t think you could read this and not be convinced, and critics of Furr’s work are pathologically incapable of actually ‘debunking’ any of the claims he makes.

[Daniel Brisbin]

holy fuck, what a book

[JoB]

A very thorough demonstration that the Moscow trials were not the farce they've been portrayed as in capitalist countries.

Quick read with plenty of primary sources.