Just as a brief sanity check: the author is a professor of Medieval English Literature (who has had tenure since the 1970s) who is quite plainly a card-carrying Stalinist. He general thesis is that Stalin committed exactly zero crimes, atrocities, persecutions, etc. Zero. He publishes exclusively with Communist-aligned presses, when he uses a press at all. He's not a historian, certainly not a Soviet/Russian historian.

No even remotely mainstream historian would bother to read the work of such an obvious crank. If there is anything of value in it, it's of the "a stopped clock is right twice a day" sort — coincidental and probably incidental. Don't rely on it for anything. The only function Furr seems to have is to give the far-right a university professor to target as "dangerous" (even though it hardly possible to imagine any effort as ineffectual as this one to "rehabilitate" Stalin).

Grover Furr, this article's author, is one of the modern world's foremost revisionist historians crackpots with respect to Iosef Stalin. He uses half-truths, out-of-context information, official Soviet Union data (which even he agrees is likely to be inaccurate), and distortions of reality to reinforce his central thesis, which he reiterated in all seriousness during a debate at Montclair University, New Jersey where Professor Furr teaches Medieval Literature (i.e. not Marxism, Political Science, World War II, Iosef Stalin, the Soviet Union, or any other topic that would grant him the authority to make the claim):

I have spent many years researching this and similar questions and I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed. ^([)^(1)^(])

Now, I'm an amateur historian myself, so please don't take that to mean that one requires certain credentials to study history and make critical conclusions about any range of topics, but you have to understand that any work of Furr's is going to approach every source with this thesis already defined in the background and therefore any evidence which contradicts that pre-formed thesis will be disregarded, while any information that supports it, no matter how indirectly or inconsequentially, will be presented as if it is the the only extant source on a subject. For Furr, Stalinist and Soviet history is a justification of his belief system-- not the catalyst for its formation.

Let's look at this article specifically. Take point 11 in Introduction:

This article draws upon primary sources whenever possible. But it relies most heavily upon scholarly works by Russian historians who have access to unpublished or recently-published documents from Soviet archives. Many Soviet documents of great importance are available only to scholars with privileged access. A great many others remain completely sequestered and "classified," including much of Stalin's personal archive, the pre-trial, investigative materials in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38, the investigative materials relating to the military purges or "Tukhachevskii Affair" of 1937, and many others.

The statement that access to certain archives is reserved to privileged scholars in the Russian Federation is certainly true-- many other scholars can attest to this fact. However, many scholars (most notably Stephen Kotkin, Robert Conquest, J.A. Getty, and Robert Service) have managed to overcome this obstacle with significant (though not life-changing) effort-- including traveling to Russia and pursuing contact with those inside the Russian academy with access to such documents. Furr makes a claim that his lack of sources is not his fault, and therefore his views should be considered as if he had the sources to support his claims because some other historian with a slanted view to present uses them as well. So Furr is the tertiary (Wikipedia-tier) source for any claim he makes. That's bad historiography, especially when you're pushing a revisionist position. Especially when that revisionist position directly contradicts nearly every other scholar in the particular field you've chosen to attempt to revise.

Furthermore, the majority of Stalin's personal archives were declassified in 2002^([)^(2)^(]), three years before this article was published. Furr glosses over his own lack of sources and then lies about the reason for their absence.

What about point 76 from Trials, Conspiracies, Repression:

The sudden uncovering in April, May and early June 1937 of what appeared to be a broadly-based military and police conspiracy caused the Stalin government to react in a panic. Genrikh Yagoda, head of the security police and Minister of Internal Affairs, was arrested in late March 1937, and began to confess in April. In May and early June 1937 high-ranking military commanders confessed to conspiring with the German General Staff to defeat the Red Army in the case of an invasion by Germany and its allies, and also to being linked to conspiracies by political figures, including many who still occupied high positions.

For a little context here, Furr is talking about the so-called Great Terror as if it were inspired by an actual conspiracy within the Soviet Union rather than a mass-extermination of Communist loyalists who personally stood in the way of Stalin's quest for ultimate power. The Stalinist position which Furr asserts as true was that figures like Mikhail Tukhachevsky (who fought in the Russian Civil War for the Reds and had a large hand in the development the Soviet military doctrine that came to be known as Deep Operation-- which upon its deployment against the Nazis had perhaps the largest impact on turning the war effort in favor of the USSR), Mikhail Bukharin (who participated in the October Revolution and edited Pravda), and Grigory Zinoviev (member of the first Soviet Politburo and head of the Communist International) had been conspiring with the German General Staff to overthrow Stalin since the 30's. That's a mighty big claim to make. What is his source? J. Arch Getty's Excesses.

J. Arch Getty is an important counterpoint to 'Great Man' theorists like Conquest and Service (who both postulate a 'totalitarian model' of the Soviet Union as a structure which operated from the top down). Getty presents the idea that the Soviet Union was too large a system for any single man to control and so some of the excesses of the Great Terror may have occurred without Stalin's direct order or approval. That view is largely where modern historians agree-- of course Stalin did not order every single execution, torture, or deportation during the Great Terror-- but that's not the accusation we're talking about here-- the accusation is that he made clear that such purges ought to happen by any means necessary.

And make it clear he did; from Stalin's own On Applying Physical Pressure to Prisoners (1939):

It has become known to the VKP CC that the secretaries of oblast and regional party committees, in checking up on employees of NKVD directorates, have laid blame on them for the use of physical pressure against those who have been arrested, treating it as something criminal. The VKP CC affirms that the use of physical pressure in the work of the NKVD has been permitted since 1937 in accordance with a resolution of the VKP CC. This directive indicated that physical pressure was to be used in exceptional cases and only against blatant enemies of the people who, when interrogated by humane methods, defiantly refuse to turn over the names of co-conspirators, and who refuse for months on end to provide any evidence, and who try to thwart the unmasking of co-conspirators who are still at large, and who thereby continue even from prison to wage a struggle against the Soviet regime.^([)^(3)^(])

So euphemism aside, Stalin is openly advocating for the use of torture in this memorandum. Of course, only against those who refuse to 'turn over the names of co-conspirators [or] provide evidence.' That statement in and of itself presumes the guilt of the victims of this state-sanctioned torture which implies the victim was given a trial of some kind, which they likely were not. So Stalin in his own words contradicts Furr and his source doesn't agree with his assertion either: Getty's central position is that academics like Conquest place too much blame on Stalin, which is certainly true. Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov were both demented figures in their own right, but they were both demented figures whom Stalin personally empowered and allowed to operate under his direct order. Moreover, a great amount of extent documents exist bearing Stalin's signature (which Furr dismisses as obvious fakes) in which he did in fact order mass amounts of execution (Tukhachevsky's 'confession' for example, is very famously splattered in blood-- likely his own). Stalin allegedly didn't even read the transcripts of Tukhachevsky's interrogation, he simply noted on the first page, 'agreed.'