He’s good.

The ‘most rational’ critique of him that I came across is that he is not an historian. The ‘critic’ implied that as history is not Furr’s expertise, his work is sub-par. This could indicate serious problems with Furr’s work.

But:

1. This criticism gives away the critic’s bourgeois world outlook and their inability to treat history as connected to other fields. If they were a Marxist, they would see that a Marxist English literature professor would work with history, political economy, etc, because Marxists see these fields as interrelated.
2. The ‘argument’ is the height of arrogance and can be reworded: “leave history to the historians”. It’s a self defense mechanism, because if people take Furr seriously, it means that leaving history to the historians was a mistake because they missed what an ‘amateur’ spotted. All this is quite embarrassing for bourgeois historians because it suggests they have not been researching in good faith.
3. I’ve only read Khrushchev Lied. Furr might have produced less rigorous history because he is not a historian. Unfortunately for the bourgeois critic, any flaws in his rigour are negligible. The whole text is fully referenced and, even more condemning for the bourgeois critic, his sources are included in the appendices. So any reader can make their mind up as to whether he is right or wrong.

His conclusion is measured. The argument in Khrushchev Lied is that Khrushchev lied in his ‘secret speech’. He does not argue that Stalin was right or never made mistakes. He dismantles the foundation of the anti-Stalin paradigm. For this reason, Furr will always be slandered.

The so called secret speech is the one that led to rifts in communist parties in the imperial core. It was this speech that gave e.g. Trotskyists an upper hand. Khrushchev’s lies vindicated almost everything Trotskyists had been saying for years. The Marxist-Leninists who had supported Stalin were silenced. That support was now taboo. And the left in the West fell apart.

Considering that most modern knowledge about Stalin comes from either Trotsky or Khrushchev, Furr provides the evidence that most of that knowledge is incorrect. He performs a mass reductio ad absurdum to a huge swathe of anti-communist arguments.

If Khrushchev lied about Stalin’s record, then what did Stalin do? We may never know. But we can now simply laugh at bourgeois historians whose work can be traced to or relies on Krushchev’s speech, because we know they are wrong. And if they persist, at least they have identified themselves as an agent of the ruling class.