I hope that you will grant me the grace that I'm not taking a liberal approach to this topic, I'm just doing my best to evaluate evidence and arguments and I'm saying that they often don't hold up. To explain a difference between my view and how liberals discuss this topic, I admit as Furr admits that Stalin was a homophobe and that this was an error, but I think holding him to modern standards is disingenuous when there were hardly any state-level actors outside of maybe East Germany [still much later than the main legislation in the USSR here, ca. 1936] that weren't and Stalin wasn't exactly trying to hunt down the gays even if he was disgusted by them (and would not have tried to genocide them like Reagan did a full ~45 years after the offending USSR legislation was established). People often point to his note on the Whyte letter, where he calls the gay communist something like a "dgenerate idiot" in his archival note, but it's also worth pointing out that in that same letter, Whyte was himself trying to draw a line between "natural" homosexuals like himself and "dgenerate bourgeois" homosexuals. There was some analytical inadequacy on Stalin's part here, but this modern effort to make him look like a Soviet Reagan or that his attitude on gays was like the Nazi attitude is ridiculous and ahistorical. I don't think Furr has discussed this at length, but I believe it's roughly also his view. If I am remembering Furr correctly, then this is a case of him not being an absolutist, because even as I call him an "absolutist," I am not trying to be an absolutist about even that claim, and will concede not only when he makes good arguments for views that happen to align with his general absolutist attitude, but also that there are exceptions to this attitude and the label is being applied as a matter of a general trend in his writing.

I don't think you have a realistic shot of persuading me on Beria since, to my understanding, there is evidence of the accusations totally independent of Khrushchev's judicial assassination of him, which was obviously only carried out for careerist reasons. I figured that Katyn would come up, and I disagree with Furr there too, but we can try actually discussing arguments. I think the stuff about the badges is rather murky and doesn't carry that much weight even if Furr is correct, and the stuff about forgeries is not adequately substantiated, and I will point out that furthermore it makes a great deal of sense for the Soviets to have done the massacre given the fact it was specifically a killing of officers (not footmen, etc.) of the Polish military, who would mostly be class enemies of the proletariat, after making some attempt of screening out sympathizers (as I believe is mentioned in some of the "Soviets-did-it" testimony, to use Furr's term), because the Soviets understood the likelihood of these officers being broken out of prison one way or another and that they were liable to support the fascists against the Soviets as many other reactionary groups in Nazi-invaded nations did. Obviously, many things said about the massacre, like conflating in other executions (if I remember right, people do lump in massacres actually done by the Nazis relatively nearby at other times as somehow also being part of "the Katyn massacre") or making some absurd claim about "cultural genocide" because many of the officers, outside of their military role, were part of the intelligentsia, etc. are just terrible fascist lies that are normalized in liberal spheres because the liberals are also "absolutists."

Looking this up again, I see that some arguments come from Sergey Romanov, who I also see is a cartoonish anti-communist hack who speaks of Nazi-Soviet "friendship," a lie that is not just disgusting but also something only believed by complete fools and which could not possibly be taken seriously by someone with his level of education (unlike some of the other accusations, even if they are false), and yet he says it anyway. Also a rather dishonest and juvenile point-scorer based on correspondence with Furr that he published. The Discourse is fucked, though that doesn't make Furr correct here.