| Michael Parenti |
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| 1933 births | |
| american historians | |
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POLITICAL VIEWS Parenti is known for his steadfast Leftist and Radical political convictions, and has described himself as a Marxist --though he regularly alleges that U.S. mass media and mainstream political commentary distort and pervert the meaning of the term. In ''Blackshirts and Reds'', Parenti suggests that common estimates of the number of deaths under Joseph Stalin are gross exaggerations, and stresses that the overwhelming majority of inmates in Gulag labor camps and colonies were sent there based on convictions for nonpolitical offences--that is to say, only a small minority were Political Prisoners . He does not offer his own estimate of the overall number of deaths under the duration of Stalinism, but cites J. Arch Getty to put the number of executions between 1921 and 1953 at 799,455. Parenti argues that the Soviet Union "made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights" under Stalin's leadership, and characterizes Leon Trotsky as being "among the more authoritarian Bolshevik leaders". Parenti has also defended Capitalism there. NOTES |