I thought the exact same thing when I first read Blackshirts & Reds about 8 years ago. I remember wondering if the .pdf of it that I downloaded had been tampered with by anti-communists or something. I kept thinking, “This is the book that everybody has been banging on, telling me it is a must-read to get educated about the USSR and how it is a the book that all the anti-AES libs need to read to set the record straight?” The very thing you mention about how Parenti seems to be repeating the classic lib canard that communism struggled to function because nobody was incentivized to work hard since lazy people had it just as good as the few hard workers, really stuck out for me too. I did stop reading it for a while out of disappointment and felt pretty disillusioned by all the glowing recommendations for it.

Even though I would like to think that I now have a better understanding of where he was coming from and even what some of his own shortcomings were (like his reliance on western sources as others have mentioned), I still kinda stand by that initial disappointment and negative assessment. This is not to say I don’t love Parenti because I do. I still get fired up watching or listening to a lot of his live talks like the famous Yellow Parenti vid, and I will always recognize him as one of the vanishingly few great western advocates for actual leftism (in a puddle of bozos like Chomsky).

But speaking of which, it is actually many of his lecture videos that I would tend towards recommending to potentially receptive libs, rather than trying to push Blackshirts & Reds on them for the exact reasons you’ve been bringing up in this thread. The book is just too rife with sentences that I know anyone who wants to denigrate the USSR, will latch onto and say “See? Stalin was a bad guy, communism does promote laziness in the workers and authoritarianism in the leaders! The USSR was a bad place to live where no one had any of the choices liberal democracies allow them! Even their own commie spokesperson guy says so!” It’s not that there isn’t some great stuff and plenty of very positive things about the USSR in the book, or even that the criticisms he makes aren’t valid, it’s that so much of it would work for someone looking to vindicate their anti-communist views. It makes it a little too easy to cherrypick the bad stuff and downplay the good. A lot of the responses you are getting here from comrades that are defending the frequently questionable phrasing Parenti uses, they aren’t wrong, but I think they may be missing the issue a bit. As a book for communists who want a critique of the USSR from another communist, BS&R is an excellent choice. But as an introductory piece to USSR/AES validity for the possibly-swayable lib, it is not the pro-communist masterpiece it’s sometimes touted as. If you really want someone to get into Parenti specifically, recommend Inventing Reality first.