chapotraphouse

Book was translated and published recently i think

The book is largely taking claims / slander aimed at the Stalin-era Soviet Union and showing how it was largely untrue but also how things were way worse in the West. I know in one section he brings up how the prison system in the US South in the period I mentioned was pretty much just what anti-communists think the gulags were (and of course mostly it was black men who suffered). I don’t recall the exact context in which Losurdo brings up lynchings, though. I remember the focus was on how white society in the south wholly participated in it, not like it was just isolated incidents of just a few participants (lynchings were advertised in the newspapers in advance and often hundreds or thousands of people would show up).

I actually expected it to be a lot more of a polemic than it was tbh

I genuinely think it's better to read that one first. It was revelatory for me.

Otherwise, Getty's Origins of the Great Purges or Furr's Khrushchev Lied.