Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeft Radio.

On today's episode, I have my co-host from Gorilla History, Henry Hackamacky, and his

co-translator, Salvatore Angle Demauri, coming on to talk about the new book from Domenico

Lasordo that they translated, the book itself is not new but the translation is new, put

out by Iskra Books called Stalin, History and Critique of a Black Legend.

So we get into this book, the contents within it, the historical and dialectical materialist

analysis that Domenico Lasordo employs to make sense of the Stalin era and to sort of

trace through history, the media, and narratives that were constructed around Stalin the figure,

and contradictory, often serving reactionary or capitalist interests.

We even talk about left anti-communism and how certain cartoonish depictions of Stalin

have manifested on the left.

This book and this conversation is not about drawing conclusive statements on big debates

within Marxism and within the left on Stalin so much as it is, trying to situate

and configure Stalin in the broader social and material circumstances that he found himself

in and making sense of Stalin as a real historical figure given that much broader context in

which he existed.

And that alone I think is a departure from so much nonsense about the period of time that

Stalin operated in, about Stalin himself, great man of history, theories of Stalin,

op-psychological analyses of Stalin and all this other sort of nonsense that can put

out there as if it were principle historical analysis.

So this is a really interesting book that I think more than anything shows the advantages

of applying a historical and dialectical analysis to anything but in this context a obviously

...