The American Left's Fixation on Stalinism

We sit down with Doug Greene to discuss his latest work on Stalinism. In this interview, Greene describes who Stalin was, what his role in the Bolshevik movement was and how he came to power. Greene then provides a compelling analysis of different paradigms of how Stalinism has been conceptualized by intellectuals from Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, to heads of states such as Winston Churchill and writers such as George Orwell. Doug Greene is a Marxist historian based in the Boston area. Our last interview with Greene was about his book on Michael Harrington, A Failure of Vision, which is a biography of Harrington, the liberal-socialist founder of the DSA. We conclude our conversation with a discussion about Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin and its shortcomings. We also discuss the specter of Stalinism on today's left and whether there is a compelling sort of psychological account as to what draws people to Stalinism to this day. Order Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn.