I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed. I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bullshit... Goebbels said that the Big Lie is successful and this is the Big Lie: that the Communists — that Stalin killed millions of people and that socialism is no good.

The full quote makes it pretty clear he’s refuting the double holocaust theory, and the context was a debate where his opponent claimed 100-150 million were killed by the communists.

The quote isn’t actually denying Stalin robbed trains in Tsarist Georgia, that the Bolsheviks shot the Romanov children, that the gulags were a pretty unpleasant place to be (although this too is greatly exaggerated), and his work fully acknowledges that the Bolsheviks were Leninists who saw violence as a tool for revolutionary political change.

You’re forming an opinion on Grove from a cherry-picked quote, taken out of context to intentionally misrepresent his actual views.

Look at his “purge” and “show trial” series for example. Grove is a serious historian and his presentation of facts is thorough and clear eyed.

https://espressostalinist.com/the-real-stalin-series/party-purges/

His “crank” status is based on quote mining, and even then it’s really this one quote. Selectively just one half of one quote, that is.

If he was really a crank then they would be attacking his work instead of an cuff comment taken out of context, made while being harangued by some Black Book of Communism shit.

Plucking a sentence from the middle of a a fucking accurate comment like that doesn’t make him a crank, it makes his opponents hacks.