H/t to Laurie aboard the leaky lifeboat for the link. Part of a wide-scale re-appraisal of figures like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the Kims, which seems to have begun about the time that VV Putin rose to power in Russia. High time, when you consider that the prevailing images that we in the West have of these people - and of everything that they did - has come exclusively from their inveterate enemies entrenched amongst the systemic professional liars of the Permanent Bullshit Blizzard of Western media, politics and academe, with which we’ve all been gavaged mercilessly since birth. Are we really going to trust such sources about anything at all? -
PS: The btl comments are worth a look too. Stephen seems to attract to his blog people with the same clarity of thought as his own.
Here is everything Gowans has to say on the topic of how many people were killed on Stalin’s orders:
As to the perennial charge that Stalin murdered millions, we can dismiss this as an unexamined legend that everyone believes to be true because someone (they just can’t remember who) told them it was, and about which they can provide no details, like who, how, when and why? William Blum writes:
“We’ve all heard the figures many times…10 million…20 million…40 million…60 million…died under Stalin. But what does the number mean, whichever number you choose? Of course many people died under Stalin, many people died under Roosevelt….Dying appears to be a natural phenomenon in every country. The question is how did those people die under Stalin? Did they die from the famines that plagued the USSR in the 1920s and 30s? Did the Bolsheviks deliberately create those famines? How? Why? More people certainly died in India in the 20th century from famines than in the Soviet Union, but no one accuses India of the mass murder of its own citizens. Did the millions die from disease in an age before antibiotics? In prison? From what causes? People die in prison in the United States on a regular basis. Were millions actually murdered in cold blood? If so, how? How many were criminals executed for non-political crimes? The logistics of murdering tens of millions of people is daunting.”
The numbers are, in fact, estimates derived by comparing the Soviet population with projections of whatever the author making the estimate thinks the population would have been at a given point had Stalin never existed. The difference between the two figures is then said to represent the missing population, or people Stalin “murdered.” It’s obvious that this method is open to abuse and that attributing excess deaths to mass murder has no other intention than to bamboozle people into believing that Stalin ordered the cold-blooded killing of tens of millions. This isn’t to say that Stalin didn’t order executions, and lots of them. He did. But executions in times of exceptional circumstances, when the revolution was under threat from within and without—as the Soviet Union was throughout the Stalin era–are no less necessary than the killing of soldiers of an invading army. It was war. Unless action fitting to war was taken, the revolution would fail. Everywhere fifth columnists facilitated the Nazi invasions, except in the Soviet Union where there was no fifth column. Stalin had eliminated it. He may have uniquely accomplished this feat by accepting a high false positive rate as the cost of extirpating the disease, catching the innocent and harmless in his net as well as the dangerous and guilty. But when it’s unclear whether the tissue is diseased or healthy, the surgeon who saves the patient cuts out both the clearly diseased and the surrounding suspicious (though possibly healthy) tissue. The question is: Did Stalin order executions to satisfy a personal lust for power, or to safeguard the revolution bequeathed by Lenin? Stalin’s political enemies have always favored the first explanation. And the CIA has ensured that those who favored it had a platform from which to spread it far and wide.
I don’t think “the question” really is whether Stalin ordered executions to satisfy a “personal lust for power”. Who cares what his motives were? Who can know? Similarly, I don’t have a clue what Tony Blair’s motives were, nor do I care. What Govans calls “the question” is a red (or Red) herring, and one with which he makes much play in this article. It appears to be a promiscuous defence of anything and everything that is done in a “war”, so long as the war is a class war, and so long as what is done is done by the winner. Govans clearly loves a winner! His contribution to the debate about … shall we call them “excess deaths”? … under Stalin is not so much negligible as non-existent. He doesn’t even mention the Soviet archives. He caricatures the whole debate in terms dripping with contempt, casual ignorance, and special pleading. I can’t claim to know much about the debate myself, but on this showing, Govans is almost the last person I would turn to in order to learn more. I think you’ve sold us a pup here, Rhis.
I’m glad you don’t claim to know much about the issue, T, because clearly none of us do. The point Gowans is making is that we all think we ‘know’ stuff ‘for sure’ about people like Stalin, Mao, Kim but the truth is we only know unrelentingly hostile and dishonest propaganda dreck that’s been hammered into us all our lives. How could that be a basis for even the most rudimentary judgement of them?
More material for disaffected scholars to form a more honest picture of these 20th century marxist revolutionary figures is now coming available. Inevitably this will provoke reassessments. No point in trying to stop that.
I suggest a second reading of the Gowan’s piece, to spot the things you seem to have missed on first reading, T! 
I don’t know what he wrote that you think I missed, or what I wrote to make you think I’d missed it. Please be more specific.
No! Go back and have a look. 
What is the point of saying that? I read every word of the article before posting anything about it.
[That’s very odd! I quoted Rhis’s post in my reply, but the quotation hasn’t appeared. Also, my post appeared with a symbol showing that it had been edited (once), even though I hadn’t edited it at all. Probably I did something silly, such as posting without realising that I had posted, and then inadvertently deleting the quote without realising that I had done so. But it is hard to believe that even I could make two such mistakes in quick succession, and been totally oblivious to both.]
[Also, that can’t be the explanation, because such a quick edit is never explicitly shown by the system. There is a grace period of a few minutes, during which you can edit your post and fix errors quickly. This is very odd.]