I read the paper. It's the 2020 Cultural Logic piece, and I'll deal with it before returning to the argument I actually care about.
First, my correction. I said Furr calls a document fake whenever it's signed. Charles said he sorts three ways: genuine, forged, and undetermined. That's accurate as a description of what Furr says he's doing. The paper's own conclusion is what settles the matter, and not in Charles's direction. Having decided from the circumstantial evidence that the Germans did it, Furr writes that it "necessarily follows" that the Closed Packet documents are forgeries, because they contradict what he has already established as genuine. That is not a document being assessed. That is a verdict being read backward into the file. He says so plainly, which I'll credit him for, and it's the whole of my original point.
How he gets there is the part worth looking at. Earlier in the paper he lays down a rule: since the packet documents would settle Soviet guilt if genuine and would leave no evidence of it if forged, an honest inquiry has to set them aside and decide the case on evidence not in dispute. Read that again. The ground for excluding a piece of evidence is that it would be decisive. Apply that rule anywhere else, and no case is ever proved, because the strongest item in every file is the first one out.
Then watch which items the rule catches. Out go the Politburo packet, the residents' testimony in the German report, and the 1990 statements by retired NKVD men. Every one of those points at the Soviets. In stays the Burdenko Commission's testimony, which is what he uses to discredit two of the three. Burdenko was a Soviet wartime body investigating whether the Soviet state had done it, at a moment when the answer mattered enormously to that state. Under Furr's own standard, it should be the first thing set aside. It survives because it says the right thing.
His definition of "unimpeachable" does the same work at the level of vocabulary. Evidence qualifies if no party contests it, or if a party contests it and then stops mentioning it. So the category is fixed by how opponents behave in print rather than by where the document came from. And the affirmative case against the packet rests on material an anonymous self-declared forger handed to a Communist Party deputy in the Duma in 2010: drafts, stamps, and blank letterhead. That gets called a credible challenge. A protocol from the Politburo archive with signatures on it does not clear the bar. I don't know how to describe that ranking except as the conclusion of doing the sorting.
Now the part I won't wave away, because it's the only real content in the paper. The Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy material is a genuine problem for someone. Two badges of Ostashkov men whose plaques stand at Mednoe, turning up in a Ukrainian grave where the recovered casings are overwhelmingly German and dated 1941. A Polish archaeological report saying so, then a sequence of revisions in which those findings stop being mentioned. If that holds up, and I can't verify Furr's account of the report from here, then some names on the Katyn and Mednoe lists belong to men who died elsewhere, at other hands, later. That is worth knowing, and it embarrasses the tidy version.
It also doesn't reach where he needs it to go. Contaminated lists and bad identifications tell you the accounting is wrong. They don't tell you the Politburo didn't decide. Furr needs the second and has produced the first, and he closes the distance with the deduction I quoted rather than with evidence.
One more cost, since he raises it himself. On his account, Shelepin, who ran the KGB, believed his own service had shot the Poles on the strength of what his own people told him and was wrong. Gorbachev's foreign minister, his KGB chairman, and the head of the International Department all urged him to confess a crime the USSR hadn't committed, having found nothing. That's a lot of people inside the apparatus getting the apparatus wrong. Possible. But a theory that has to carry it should say what it's carrying.
And now I've spent a page in the archives, which is the outcome I predicted and the reason I didn't want to start. Charles can send another paper, and I can send another page, and neither of us will move. The question I'd rather he answer is the one none of this touches. Whatever happened in the Katyn forest, the Soviet worker had no say over what was produced or where it went, and neither does the worker in Camas. If that isn't what socialists are against, I'd like to hear what is.
How he gets there is the part worth looking at. Earlier in the paper he lays down a rule: since the packet documents would settle Soviet guilt if genuine and would leave no evidence of it if forged, an honest inquiry has to set them aside and decide the case on evidence not in dispute. Read that again. The ground for excluding a piece of evidence is that it would be decisive. Apply that rule anywhere else, and no case is ever proved, because the strongest item in every file is the first one out.
Then watch which items the rule catches. Out go the Politburo packet, the residents' testimony in the German report, and the 1990 statements by retired NKVD men. Every one of those points at the Soviets. In stays the Burdenko Commission's testimony, which is what he uses to discredit two of the three. Burdenko was a Soviet wartime body investigating whether the Soviet state had done it, at a moment when the answer mattered enormously to that state. Under Furr's own standard, it should be the first thing set aside. It survives because it says the right thing.
His definition of "unimpeachable" does the same work at the level of vocabulary. Evidence qualifies if no party contests it, or if a party contests it and then stops mentioning it. So the category is fixed by how opponents behave in print rather than by where the document came from. And the affirmative case against the packet rests on material an anonymous self-declared forger handed to a Communist Party deputy in the Duma in 2010: drafts, stamps, and blank letterhead. That gets called a credible challenge. A protocol from the Politburo archive with signatures on it does not clear the bar. I don't know how to describe that ranking except as the conclusion of doing the sorting.
Now the part I won't wave away, because it's the only real content in the paper. The Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy material is a genuine problem for someone. Two badges of Ostashkov men whose plaques stand at Mednoe, turning up in a Ukrainian grave where the recovered casings are overwhelmingly German and dated 1941. A Polish archaeological report saying so, then a sequence of revisions in which those findings stop being mentioned. If that holds up, and I can't verify Furr's account of the report from here, then some names on the Katyn and Mednoe lists belong to men who died elsewhere, at other hands, later. That is worth knowing, and it embarrasses the tidy version.
It also doesn't reach where he needs it to go. Contaminated lists and bad identifications tell you the accounting is wrong. They don't tell you the Politburo didn't decide. Furr needs the second and has produced the first, and he closes the distance with the deduction I quoted rather than with evidence.
One more cost, since he raises it himself. On his account, Shelepin, who ran the KGB, believed his own service had shot the Poles on the strength of what his own people told him and was wrong. Gorbachev's foreign minister, his KGB chairman, and the head of the International Department all urged him to confess a crime the USSR hadn't committed, having found nothing. That's a lot of people inside the apparatus getting the apparatus wrong. Possible. But a theory that has to carry it should say what it's carrying.
And now I've spent a page in the archives, which is the outcome I predicted and the reason I didn't want to start. Charles can send another paper, and I can send another page, and neither of us will move. The question I'd rather he answer is the one none of this touches. Whatever happened in the Katyn forest, the Soviet worker had no say over what was produced or where it went, and neither does the worker in Camas. If that isn't what socialists are against, I'd like to hear what is.
--
A rolling stone gathers no Furr, Tony Sasso
It is possible that I could disgrace myself. But there's always a bit of Dialectic to help out. I have naturally expressed my statements so that I am also right if the opposite thing happens
Marx an Engels, 15. August 1857
"Es ist möglich, daß ich mich blamiere. Indes ist dann immer mit einiger Dialektik zu helfen. Ich habe natürlich meine Aufstellungen so gehalten, daß ich im umgekehrten Fall auch Recht habe."
MEW a.a.O. 29, 161., Rotbuch S. 115
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