The Revolutionary Vanguard

The pairing of the two authors is itself the commission. Boris Leibzon was a Comintern historian working from the party archives; Mikhail Basmanov was the Soviet apparatus's professional answerer of Trotskyists. One held the ultraleft file, the other the Trotskyist file, and this is the book where the machinery is visible without disassembly.

Its subject is the party question: what a revolutionary vanguard is, who qualifies as one, and by what test. The answer is stated on the first working page - that a movement's attitude to the party, to its character and its role, is the criterion of a true revolutionary spirit. Not the class you come from; the party you accept.

That shift is the most interesting thing here, and the authors half-acknowledge it. A chapter heading asks outright whether present-day deviations remain petty-bourgeois, and the answer concedes almost everything before keeping the word anyway: the petty bourgeoisie Marx and Engels opposed no longer exists in Europe, and has become something quite different. Regis Debray had complained the label meant nothing in Latin America; they accept it means little in Europe either, and retain it.

It is the third of four related volumes by these two hands, and the most revealing, because the sorting is done openly and the older sociological apparatus has been quietly dropped.

Basmanov was known well enough abroad to be answered by name, at length, in the press of the movement he attacked.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.