Book Review: For a Few Canards More: Counter Inquiry on Stalin and the Soviet Union

For a Few Canards More:  Counter Inquiry on Stalin and the Soviet Union by Aymeric Monville.  (Great Britain: Iskra Books, 2024.  106 pp. $13.50.)

Aymeric Monville, an author and the publisher of Delga Editions,  the most important Marxist press in France, has produced a marvelous new book, For a Few Canards More, which provides a practical and readable way to catch up on recent scholarship on Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Monville, as a publisher, is well-acquainted with this scholarship, since Delga has published much of it, including works by the American historians, Grover Furr and Mark Tauger, the British historian, Geoffrey Roberts, and the historian Guillaume Suing.  Monville also relies on such other scholars as John Getty, G.T. Rittersporn, and R.T. Manning, as well as the Soviet scholar Viktor N. Zemskov, a specialist in the Soviet archives.

Monville’s book is a series of short, punchy essays in which he refutes and often ridicules some of the most popular canards about Stalin and the Soviet Union.  Though many of these are anti-Soviet accusations of longstanding, many have acquired a new lease on life and have appeared recently or on film and in print.  Some of these canards appeared in French sources that may be  unfamiliar to American readers,  but the lies and distortions  themselves will be easily recognized since their main purveyors are such American writers as Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.  Moreover, the book The Black Books of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression that appeared originally in French in 1997, was translated and published by Harvard University two years later.

Monville’s book is extremely timely, because the attacks on Stalin and the Soviet Union have only increased since the disappearance of the Soviet Union.  In September 2019, for example, the European parliament declared an equivalence between fascism and communism.   These attacks persist even though the opening of the Soviet archives has decimated a number of them.

Among other topics that Monville takes up are the size and nature of the Soviet gulag and the number of deaths that occurred, the idea that Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine of 1931-33, the idea that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 20,000 Polish officers, the idea that  Stalin deported Soviet soldiers who had been captured and held as prisoners of war by the Germans, the idea that the Soviet biologist Trofim Lyssenko was a charlatan or impostor, the idea that the Soviets delivered anti-fascist Germans to the fascist government during the period of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, and the idea that the Soviet government caused needless suffering for the Chechens, the Ingush, and the  Tartars by their forced evacuation during World War II.   As Monville shows that much recent scholarship particularly with information from the Soviet archives makes “cat litter” of these black legends of communism.

Monville deals in advance with certain objections from the left that might be raised about this book.   Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, is it necessary to dwell on its history?   Since it is unlikely that the struggle for socialism in the future will occur under the conditions of war and encirclement faced by the Soviet Union, is it necessary to revisit Stalin?   Monville answers in no uncertain terms:   1991 did not erase 1945.  The disappearance of the Soviet Union did not obliterate the importance of the defeat of fascism of which the Soviet Union was the principal motor.  Nor is there any reason for the left to be ashamed of the accomplishments of the Soviet Union, particularly those that contrast sharply with fascism, including giving birth to a society that despised racism, that did not regard war as a positive, and that rejected colonialism.

Moreover, at a time when the fascists and neo-fascists like the Ukrainian followers of Stepan Bandera are treated as heroes by the western media and our children are brainwashed by anti-communist ideas equating fascism and communism, it is cowardice not to respond to the lies that still surround Stalin and the Soviet Union.