Ah, Grover Furr. Deep breath. This will not be a dissecting of Furr's writings, a la /r/badhistory, largely because I don't think he's worth the trouble.

So let me start with Furr and then quickly move onto the actual history. There's a lot of conflicting opinions in studies of the Soviet Union but I hope to show that Furr is pretty much out of step with all of them.

In short: there's plenty of evidence as to Stalin's responsibility. He literally signed death warrants.

The man in question

First things first, it's important to note that Furr is not a historian. He's a professor of English whose interests happen to wander. He has published no peer-reviewed papers in relevant journals and his books have passed by entirely unnoticed by, well, actual historians.

Not being a professional historian is not necessarily a barrier to making a contribution to the field. No, the reason for that in Furr's case is that he's a rank apologist who is primarily interested in rehabilitating Stalin's reputation and rejecting as 'anti-communist' almost every impingement of this since 1956.

As I say above, I'm not going to spend much time on Furr himself because frankly he's not worth it. A quick summary of some of his more prominent arguments is enough: the Soviets were not responsible for the Katyn Massacre, the Soviet Union did not invade Poland in 1939, Stalin's opponents at the Show Trials were indeed guilty and any 'excesses' were the fault of Ezhov.

None of these positions are supported by actual historians who write on the topic today. The arguments that Furr constructs to support these rely on arbitrarily dismissing evidence as fake (including signed orders from Stalin and Molotov's recollections), disingenuous semantics, simply accepting Soviet categories at face value, dismissing all those who disagree as 'anti-communist' stooges, etc. And Furr is proud of being beyond the 'mainstream'.

So basically he's a crank and a Stalinist apologist.

But let's move on to what those 'anti-communists' think, ie those historians who do publish professionally on Stalinism.

How many died?

On the question of the number of 'repression deaths' under Stalin, we'll never know for sure. There were 874,074 executions recorded by the NKVD between 1928 and 1953, the vast majority of which fell during the Purge years of 1937-38. There's a host of problems with this figure, including categorisation and completeness, but there's also pretty much unanimity that it's a base, ie the actual deaths are likely to be significantly higher. Ditto with other 'custodial deaths', eg in the penal system or during deportation. Again, firm figures are very tricky - eg how to account for NKVD Order No 00141 which allowed camps to discharge unrecorded numbers of ill prisoners who were on the point of death?

(And I'm deliberately avoiding famine deaths, which is another discussion altogether.)

So post-Soviet research has shown that the nature of Soviet repression was more complex than originally thought. Certainly there are those who would suggest that the estimates of Robert Conquest et al are far too high. Yet what's not in doubt is that millions did indeed die due to deliberate action by the Soviet state. Michael Ellman, in his useful summary of the different estimates (Soviet Repression Statistics), puts the figure at 1-1.2m for 1937-38 alone.

What was the role of Stalin?

Leaving aside fudging of numbers and simply accepting that those shot deserved it (as he does here - not noting that the estimates of those "some Poles" arrested range from 400-600k), Furr's default approach is to blame any excesses on Stalin's underlings, particularly Ezhov. Which, happily, is what Ezhov was executed for in 1940. The system works.

The role that Stalin played in the Soviet government is fascinating and has undergone considerable revision in the past two decades. Once surprisingly marginalised by historians, the opening of the archives has restored him to centre stage in determining policy. Notions of an anti-Stalin faction in the Politburo have given way to an appreciation for how Stalin was able to forge a durable and loyal circle of administrators, a 'Team Stalin' in Wheatcroft's memorable phrase. In this Stalin was very much primus inter pares: his policies were not unquestioned prior to the Purge but he generally got his way and it was inconceivable that a major policy could proceed without his approval. From the end of rationing to the launching of the Purges, he was at the centre of events.

Obviously it's the latter that we're concerned about here. There can be little question that the decision to launch the Purges was Stalin's and that he was fully aware of the actions of Ezhov's NKVD. Here I'm going to just quote from Suny's Structure of Soviet History:

Stalin guided and prodded forward the arrests, show trials and executions, aided by the closest members of his entourage: Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Mikoyan and Ezhov. Here personality and politics merged and the degree of excess repression was dictated by the peculiar demands of Stalin himself.

...

One note to Ezhov will suffice to give the type of intervention that the vozhd' [leader] engaged in. In May 1937 he wrote: "One might think that prison for Beloborodov is a podium for reading speeches, statements which refer to the activities of all sorts of people but not himself. Isn't it time to squeeze this gentleman and make him tell about his dirty deeds? Where is he, in prison or a hotel?"

Whatever his motivations, which remain disputed, the archives have yielded an abundant number of such reports and memos to and from Stalin during the Purges. He was at the very least aware of their progress - he regularly reviewed and signed off on quotas and death sentences. Critically, it was his orders in July 1937 that broadened the scope of the repression into the 'mass operations' and he was involved in the setting/monitoring of regional quotas to control the process. It was also his initiative to simultaneously launch the 'national operations' against national minorities.

In this Oleg Khlevniuk has cast Ezhov as merely the 'executor of his master's will'. Stalin and Ezhov were in close contact during the Purge years: they spoke almost daily and Stalin personally reviewed and edited many of the key NKVD directives. Not only was he involved at Politburo level but he personally urged a number regional agents via telegram to pursue harsher measures against the supposed enemies.

Questions remain as to the context of the Purges - eg were they a 'blind terror' (Getty) or a deliberate attempt by a 'gardening state' to reshape society by purging it of undesirables (Hagenloh and Shearer)? - but the idea that Stalin was ignorant as to the scale and purpose of the terror is just unsustainable in light of the archival evidence.

Wrapping-up

So there's still a lot of questions around the scale and nature of Stalinist repression. We'll likely never know for sure just how many died and what exactly Stalin's role in this was. There are no easy answers here.

Yet we have made considerable progress over the past two decades. The opening of the archives means that we can be surer about the range of repression deaths and the importance of Stalin's role in the machinery of state. What is certain is that we know enough to dismiss Furr out of hand. Millions died due to processes and campaigns that Stalin was intimately involved in. That much is straightforward.

But Furr is capable of ignoring all this. He dismisses archival evidence as fake when it suits him (ie Katyn) and leaps on it with joy when it suggests a downwards revisions of death totals (ie Getty's penal deaths). He is both scathing of post-Stalin pronouncements (ie Khrushchev) and slavishly follows the official word during the Stalin years (ie the show trials). And, of course, everybody else is an 'anti-communist' stooge.

There's a huge degree of nuance and discussion in academia over Stalinism, with plenty of conflicting theories out there. But Furr is not part of that - he's off in the distance, preaching to Stalinists and conspiracy theorists. As I said up front, he's an apologist.

Sources

On repression deaths:

Ellman's Soviet Repression Statistics is the best place to start for a summary of the debate on this. Getty et al's Victims of the Soviet Penal System is the key paper in English (while old, it's still more nuanced than anything Furr has produced). Wheatcroft (Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings) and Conquest (The Great Terror: A Reassessment) take very different approaches to reach very different conclusions to each other.

On the role of Stalin:

This is so hot right now. For the inner circle, Khlevniuk's Master of the House draws on a wealth of archival correspondence to understand how the Stalinist elite operated on an individual level. Wheatcroft (From Team-Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny) and Rees (particularly in Behind the Facade of Stalin's Command Economy) take slightly differing approaches both show how the Stalin-dominated state operated.

On a broader canvass, Getty (Road to Terror) rejects the idea of a premeditated plan for the Purges but still places Stalin at the centre of a party in a state of panic. In contrast, Hagenloh (Stalin's Police) and Shearer (Policing Stalin's Socialism) put the purges in the context of a longer Soviet tradition of actively categorising and liquidating large sections of its population. All provide documentation or summaries of how Stalin was a driver of violence.

Despite it's absurd lack of an index, Suny's The Structure of Soviet History contains both an overview of Stalin's role and a number of communications from/to him regarding the violence.

Grover Furr is something of crank and a crackpot among scholars of Stalin and the Soviet Union. /u/International_KB recently summed up some the problems with Furr (I particularly the line "He might have discovered the secret to eternal life in the archives and I wouldn't believe it until it was independently corroborated"- but then again, my students tell me I have a weird sense of humor).

For Stalin's atrocities, this can be something of a minefield for the unwary. For example, on the opposite side of the political spectrum of Furr, Robert Conquest never met a bad story about Stalin he did not repeat. Conquest's biography of Stalin (Stalin: Breaker of Nations) actually managed to do the near impossible and be unfair to the dictator.

For actual sources to consult, Sheila Fitzpatrick is probably one of the best historians to consult for the bigger picture of Stalinism. Her Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s focuses largely upon the social history of Soviet urban dwellers and the Terror and other arbitrary state repression was a consistent facet of daily life for Soviet citizens. Fitzpatrick also has an upcoming book, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics which examines the lives of Stalin and his inner circle. Going closer to the Great Purges, the atrocity in which Stalin was most culpable, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov's The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 has a mixture of some 200 primary sources detailing the conduct of the Purges with commentary on these documents by Getty and Naumov. Peter Whitewood also has a new book on the Purges and the Red Army, The Red Army and the Great Terror, which argues that Stalin launched a campaign against the leadership of the military from a position of fear and weakness.

These book recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg, but even responsible historians get dragged into these politicized debates about Stalin. Getty, for example, is frequently cited on r/ communism to defend Stalin and refute charges of anticommunists like Conquest. In a nutshell, Getty examines how there often was pressure from the bottom-up and popular participation within Soviet Terror and the Purges were much more than directives initiated in the Kremlin. But Getty's broad corpus of scholarship on the Purges and use of terror does not absolve the Soviet state and its leaders of responsibility for this process. Similarly, r/ communism often uses a selective reading of Stephen Wheatcraft's The Years of Hunger to prove that Stalin did not engineer the Ukrainian famine. Using Wheatcraft to defend Stalin/communism in this fashion misses the forest for the trees. The Years of Hunger argues that a poorly thought-out and implemented collectivization drive, coupled with bad weather, created a famine which Soviet officials could be callously indifferent to. Stalinist modernism (i.e. massive state projects) also engendered a breezy self-confidence that discouraged actually paying attention to the human costs of this modernity. This is actually an indictment of Stalin and Stalinism that, at least in my mind, is more credible and damning than the jeremiads from the likes of Conquest and Pipes which put the man at the epicenter of everything that went wrong within the Soviet Union.

Also, it pales into insignificance, but in terms of crimes committed by Stalin, in the sense of old fashioned robbery, the Tiflis robbery is pretty clearly on him as one of the main conspirators.

My favorite area of study in the Soviet Union is the Gulags, which also happens to be one of the more well-known atrocities that was instituted under Stalin. A good all-around history would be Anne Applebaums Gulag: A History. It goes into full detail of the entire camp system begun under Stalin and into its very dark history under Lavernity Beria, head of the NKVD. I have the book and can cite some of the evidence within if anybody's interested, but this is a very well-known facet of the USSR and is inarguably an atrocity committed during Stalin's reign.

A crime against humanity may not constitute a "crime" in soviet Russia. So, with that mindset; Stalin probably never stepped out of the bounds of legality. With that said: Purposely starving Berliners for political gain which forced the "Berlin airlift," millions staved during forced industrialization and forced collective farming, the millions of killed USSR for political reasons and to boot trying to erase people from history via destroying records and having pictures ''photoshopped'' might be rather heavily frowned upon by society if not an actual crime.