So, the discussion thread on this topic was introduced by a man name Grover Furr, who is a professor and possibly (it is never stated) an expert on the Katyn Massacre or Russian history in general. However, according to his post and other individuals' responses to his post, it seems as if he is a Stalin apologist, and while he claims he is not, that is still up for debate. His post on the Katyn Massacre is his attempt at claiming the documents used to incriminate Stalin, the ones most recently used by the Russian Duma, were falsified. He gives a link to a Russian magazine article in which the original documents have been scanned in and can easily be read. Furr sites these documents and lists a few reasons as to why he believes they are in fact fake. The responses to this post were, to say the least, highly entertaining (apparently no one really likes Mr. Furr....) Scholars were in an uproar about Furr's claim that Stalin was not at fault. One Walter McIntosh states, "Grover Furr has a history of showing an irrational bias in regard to Stalin and his crimes against humanity."
This is actually one of the nicer responses to Furr's post. However, from an historical point of view, the comment
I found most interesting was "...[no] expert would ever render any professional opinion from a digitized copy of a
document."
As historians, or at the least students of historical study, what do we make of this comment? Do we ever study digitized
copies of documents and draw conclusions from them? If so, are those conclusions null and void because of the medium
of the document? Do we always have access to the original document in question, and if we do not, what then?
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