Man of Steel - Myth and Critique of Joseph Stalin

The purpose of this project is to critically evaluate the history of Stalin and Stalinism. Since the beginning of the Cold War, the selective rendition of Soviet history has been used to delegitimise socialist political movements globally, whilst simultaneously downplaying or ignoring the multiple horrors inflicted on colonised populations by capitalist imperialism. Stalinism as a concept has been central to the denigration of ‘actually existing socialism’, and is often portrayed as the end result or final consequence of any attempt to build real socialist alternatives.

Many self-proclaimed socialists in the West have adopted the capitalist telling of Soviet history wholesale, abandoning any attempts at materialist analysis altogether. But to place all the blame for the failures of the Soviet Union with Stalin alone is both intellectually lazy and politically dangerous. Unless the Left learns from the mistakes of history it is doomed to repeat them.

Until the opening of the Soviet Archives by Gorbachev after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, most history on the Stalin era was written based on scant empirical evidence, predominantly from Trotsky or other anecdotal sources from political enemies. Despite obvious bias, these interpretations of events were taken as fact by most Western historians during the Cold War, especially after Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956, following Stalin's death. These sources formed the foundation of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda.

Starting any discussion about actually existing socialism from the assumption that the version of history put forward by the capitalist superstructure is true prime-facie, rather than challenging its ideologically distorted assertions, puts socialists at a disadvantage rhetorically. Responding to accounts of the many tragedies that occurred in the Soviet Union with claims that:
”it was all Stalin’s fault”,
“it wasn’t really socialism”, or
“our version would of socialism be different’,
is not a convincing rebuttal for non-partisan observers. The Left needs to start seriously engaging with its own history, and taking accountability for it, if it wants to win the hearts and minds of the people it seeks to liberate.

This podcast is a modest attempt to provide an overview of the relatively new literature on the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin, which has been slowly emerging since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of this new history has not been written by Marxists or Socialists, but instead by authors with liberal or conservative sympathies. The gradual fading away of Cold War polemics since the collapse of the Soviet Union has created space for higher levels of academic integrity, based on the judicious use of newly abundant primary source material.

Unsubstantiated pseudo-psychology, once prevalent in Stalin biographies, has given way to trenchant criticisms of Marxist ideology itself as the root cause of all socialist evils. Far from being an irrelevant topic of the past, critical engagement with the latest revisions to the history of Stalinism is consequential to winning the argument for a socialist future.

• No. of episodes: 9
• Latest episode: 2026-07-03
• Society & Culture History

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