Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scattered defenders though, putting out books and articles trying to turn his legacy into something commendable that we ought to try and build upon today. Returning today is Douglas Greene, who is not one of his defenders, but instead has written a book exploring the defenses of Stalin with his new book In Stalin’s Shadow: Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials (Resistance Books, 2025). Much of the text is concerned with fact-checking, going through the middle decades of the twentieth century to give a critical accounting of Stalin, but one that nonetheless holds onto the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Beyond this fact-checking mission though, the book also takes this time as an opportunity to reflect on some of the deeper structures of thought that might lead one to defend Stalin. Rather than a simple mistake that can be easily corrected with a couple new facts, Greene sees neo-Stalinism as a sort of leftist conspiracy theory, one that mirrors much of the paranoia of Stalin’s own time. The book then is an opportunity to reflect on what sort of reasoning takes us into these sorts of dead-ends, and what sorts of reasoning might be needed to help us start building towards a truly revolutionary future.
Much of the content of this book builds on Greene’s previously published book The Dialectics of Saturn, which we discussed a couple years ago.
Douglas Greene is an independent historian. His many previous books have included A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union and The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade's Revenge, all of which have been discussed previously on this show. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice.
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