At the Turning Points of History

The organising idea of this book is a calendar. Casting back over the whole history of the movement, S. P. Trapeznikov defines four periods in Marxism's struggle against revisionism. Each period has its heretics, each ends in their defeat, and each defeat is followed by a fresh outbreak.

The first runs from the 1840s to the 1890s, when the enemies were external: Lassalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and - in an episode handled well, from the National Assembly debates of the day - the capture of the co-operative and trade-union movements by men like Louis Blanc with French state money. The second opens at the close of the nineties with revisionism from within: Bernstein, Vollmar, Stammler, then Kautsky, Hilferding, Adler and Bauer. The third opens with October 1917, and here the naming is at its fullest: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, the Left Communists, the Democratic Centralism group, the Workers' Opposition, each with his offices recorded in bureaucratic detail and his positions tracked through the congress transcripts. The fourth begins at the end of the forties, and the naming stops.

Trapeznikov was head of the Central Committee's Department of Science and Educational Institutions - not a scholar writing at a distance from power but the official who supervised what Soviet historians were permitted to publish. That makes this an unusually direct statement of the official line on the history of dissent within Marxism, at the moment the Brezhnev leadership was settling that line for good.

A periodisation of this kind is never neutral. It is a list of who was wrong at each stage, drawn up to establish who is wrong now.

Translated by Bernard Isaacs. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on which years the calendar declines to number.