The title page of this book names no author. It says: "EDITED BY A COMMISSION OF THE C.C. OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.)" and, below that, "AUTHORIZED BY THE C.C. OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.) 1938". That is the whole attribution, and it is the most honest sentence in the volume. This is not a history written by historians and then approved. It is a decision of a governing body, issued in the form of a history.
The Short Course was serialised in Pravda in September 1938 and published as a book immediately afterwards; the English edition followed in 1939 and is the text reprinted here. Its drafting was done principally by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and Pyotr Pospelov, both apparatus men with scholarly pretensions, working under an editorial control that Stalin exercised personally and heavily; the philosophical section of Chapter Four, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", is his own composition and was later reprinted under his name. In November 1938 a Central Committee decree made the book the single authorised textbook of party history and the backbone of all party education, displacing every other account, including several written by the same Yaroslavsky. What followed was probably the largest print run of any political text of the twentieth century: something in the region of forty million copies in the Soviet Union alone before Stalin's death, and translations into dozens of languages for the world communist movement. Every Communist Party from Barcelona to Shanghai studied it. Whatever else it was, it was effective.
It is essential to fix the date. The book appeared as the mass operations of the Terror were being wound down — Nikolai Yezhov was removed from the NKVD in late 1938, and shot in 1940 — and it is best understood not as a history that preceded the killings but as the explanation issued after them. Roughly a million and a half people were arrested in 1937 and 1938; NKVD records released from the archives in the 1990s account for some 680,000 executions in those two years. A regime that had shot its own founding generation needed a narrative in which that was the correct and even the merciful thing to have done. The Short Course is that narrative. It was published so that the question would not be asked again.
Begin where the falsification is most complete, because it is also most checkable. Chapter Seven covers the October insurrection. The reader is told:
On the instructions of the Central Committee of the Party, a Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was set up. This body became the legally functioning headquarters of the uprising.
And then:
This Party Centre was the leading core of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and had practical direction of the whole uprising.
The "Party Centre" is said to have been elected on 16 October and headed by Stalin. Now note what the chapter never does. It never says who chaired the Petrograd Soviet. It never says who chaired the Military Revolutionary Committee. Across some twenty pages narrating the seizure of power, the two most important offices in the insurrection are described repeatedly and their holders are never named — because both were held by Trotsky, elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet on 25 September (Old Style) 1917. The body elected on 16 October was in the record a five-man "Military Revolutionary Centre" — Bubnov, Dzerzhinsky, Sverdlov, Stalin and Uritsky — designated as a component of the Soviet's committee, and no minute survives of it ever meeting as a directing body. The Central Committee protocols for 1917 were published in the Soviet Union in 1929 and can be consulted. The Short Course did not invent a document; it promoted a line in a minute into the general staff of a revolution. Trotsky had made the point in 1938, in an essay the American magazine Fourth International reprinted in 1950: the "Center" appointed on the night of 16 October "was forgotten by everybody, even by its own members", and the old minutes recording it, "discovered by chance in 1924 and falsely interpreted, have served as a base for the bureaucratic legend" ("Art and Politics in Our Epoch", vol. XI no. 2, March–April 1950).
Trotsky appears in the October narrative exactly twice, both times as a saboteur. First, at the meeting of 10 October, where "he moved an amendment which would have reduced the chances of the uprising to nought". Second:
At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky in a fit of boasting blabbed to the enemy the date on which the Bolsheviks had planned to begin the armed uprising.
Set beside this the roll of Bolsheviks the book does credit with organising the rising in the provinces: Voroshilov, Molotov, Dzerzhinsky, Ordjonikidze, Kirov, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev, Frunze, Yaroslavsky, Zhdanov — and "Comrade Yezhov", who "made preparations for an uprising of the soldiers on the Western Front, in Byelorussia". Yezhov in 1917 was a twenty-two-year-old soldier who had joined the party months earlier and was unknown outside his garrison. He is in the list because in 1938, when the list was drawn up, he ran the political police. The list is not a record of 1917. It is a photograph of the Politburo and its clients at the moment of printing, projected backwards twenty-one years.
Sometimes the erasure is done with a flourish of apparent fairness. Of the Mezhrayontsi, the Petrograd group Trotsky led into the Bolshevik Party at the Sixth Congress, the book concedes that "Volodarsky and Uritsky, for example, actually did become Bolsheviks" — both, conveniently, killed in 1918 and therefore safe to praise — before delivering the verdict that Trotsky and his friends "had joined not to work in the interests of the Party, but to disrupt and destroy it from within". The concession exists to make the condemnation look weighed.
The characteristic method of the Short Course is not the forged document. It is the change of category. Read the summary of the 1937–38 trials in Chapter Twelve:
The insidious attempts to thwart the peace of Brest-Litovsk at the beginning of 1918 ... the villainous shot that wounded Lenin in the summer of 1918 ... the deliberate aggravation of differences in the Party in 1921 with the object of undermining and overthrowing Lenin's leadership from within, the attempts to overthrow the Party leadership during Lenin's illness and after his death ... all these and similar villainies over a period of twenty years, were committed, it transpired, with the participation or under the direction of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov and their henchmen, at the behest of espionage services of bourgeois states.
Nearly every event in that sentence happened. There was a bitter fight over Brest-Litovsk, in which Bukharin led the Left Communists and Trotsky held a third position. There was a trade union controversy in 1921. There was a succession struggle during and after Lenin's illness. These are the ordinary furniture of a revolutionary party's history, and the reader who knows nothing else will find them here more or less where they belong. What has been altered is their status. Political disagreement, recorded in published minutes, is retrospectively reclassified as espionage. The technique works precisely because it does not require lying about the events; the events are the alibi. Nothing is fabricated except the motive, and the motive is the whole charge.
The one document the chapter cannot reclassify it simply omits. Lenin's dictated notes of December 1922 to January 1923 — what became known as the Testament, in which he proposed removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary — are absent. The word does not appear in this book. Chapter Nine narrates Lenin's illness, his death, the Lenin Enrolment and Stalin's funeral oration ("We Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of a special stuff") at some length, and in that entire passage there is no hint that Lenin's last political act concerned the man delivering the vow. The suppression was total and it was noticed: writing in December 1940, the editors of Fourth International observed that the Testament had "to this day" never been published in the Soviet Union at all ("Our Lenin", vol. I no. 7). It was not printed there until 1956.
On Kirov, murdered in Leningrad on 1 December 1934, the book advances by stages, each of which contradicts the last and none of which is flagged as a revision. First a Leningrad group of former Zinovievites; then a "Moscow Centre"; then, a year later, "the actual, real and direct organizers of the murder of Kirov were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their accomplices". Trotsky was in Norway. The evidence against all of them was confession, obtained by methods the reader is not told about. Trotsky's public summary of the last of the trials, quoted a decade later in Fourth International, put the arithmetic where the book will not: "Of the nine people who were members of the Political Bureau during Lenin's lifetime, i.e., actual rulers of the fate of the USSR, there remains only one unaccused, Stalin." The Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey, which took testimony in Coyoacán in April 1937 and published its findings as Not Guilty in 1938, examined the charges of the first two Moscow trials in detail and found them unproven and the defendants Trotsky and Leon Sedov not guilty. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the USSR quashed the verdicts against Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their co-defendants and the Communist Party posthumously restored their membership. The 1936–38 trials are today rejected as fabrications by essentially every serious historian, Russian and Western, in any political tradition.
The chapter's final movement should be read exactly as printed. The section is headed "LIQUIDATION OF THE REMNANTS OF THE BUKHARIN-TROTSKY GANG OF SPIES, WRECKERS AND TRAITORS TO THE COUNTRY. PREPARATIONS FOR THE ELECTION OF THE SUPREME SOVIET OF THE U.S.S.R. BROAD INNER-PARTY DEMOCRACY AS THE PARTY'S COURSE." Three sentences dispose of the executions:
The Soviet court sentenced the Bukharin-Trotsky fiends to be shot. The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs carried out the sentence. The Soviet people approved the annihilation of the Bukharin-Trotsky gang and passed on to next business.
The next business is inner-party democracy: secret ballots, an end to co-option, "the unlimited right to challenge candidates and to criticize them", and the December 1937 election in which 98.6 per cent voted for the single bloc. The two subjects are not held apart. They are consecutive paragraphs, and the book sees no difficulty.
The scale is where the silence is loudest. The named dead in these pages are a few dozen former leaders. Of the Seventeenth Congress of 1934 the book records "1,225 delegates with vote and 736 delegates with voice but no vote", and adds that it "is known in history as the 'Congress of Victors'". At the Twentieth Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev told the assembled delegates that 1,108 of that congress's delegates had been arrested on counter-revolutionary charges and that 98 of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee it elected had been shot. The Short Course was written in the middle of that, for the survivors, by some of the people doing it.
Chapter Eleven covers collectivisation. The word "famine" occurs eight times in this book — for the crop failures of tsarist agriculture, for the hunger of the Civil War, and once as a hypothetical warning that stagnant grain farming would leave the towns "faced with chronic famine". It is never once used of 1932–33.
What the book does supply is an admission carefully bounded in time and blame. The "distortions" of early 1930 are conceded:
It was found that the voluntary principle of forming collective farms was being violated, and that in a number of districts the peasants were being forced into the collective farm[s] under threat of being dispossessed, disfranchised, and so on.
But the fault belongs to over-enthusiastic local officials, to the leadership of the Moscow Region and Transcaucasia, and above all to the class enemy, who "instigated the peasants to slaughter their animals". The remedy is Stalin's article of 2 March 1930, "Dizzy With Success", of which the book says: "The article set the minds of the peasants at rest." After that, the narrative reports only success, and the elimination of the kulaks (well-to-do peasants) as a class is presented as an accomplished structural fact — the policy "eliminated the most numerous class of exploiters in our country, the kulak class" — with no statement anywhere of what happened to the human beings so classified. Well over a million and a half people were deported to "special settlements" in 1930–31 alone, in operations documented from Soviet archives since the 1990s, and mortality in transit and on arrival was severe.
Of the famine of 1932–33 there is nothing. The scholarship remains genuinely divided on the numbers and sharply divided on intent: excess deaths across the USSR are usually placed somewhere between five and seven million, with the largest concentrations in Ukraine, the Kuban and Kazakhstan, and historians continue to argue whether the Ukrainian catastrophe is properly described as a genocide directed at a nation or as the lethal outcome of a grain-extraction policy pursued without regard to who died. What is not in dispute is that millions starved in a peacetime economy under the direct administration of the party whose history this is, in the years the book covers, in the chapter that covers them. The silence is not an oversight of emphasis. It is the largest single fact removed from the volume.
The last surprise is what the Short Course does to the movement it was written for. The word "Comintern" does not appear. "Third International" appears five times, all of them before 1919, in the account of its founding. After Chapter Eight the Communist International effectively ceases to exist in these pages. A textbook produced for every Communist Party on earth contains no history of the organisation to which those parties belonged.
Spain follows from this. The Spanish war of 1936–39 was raging as the book went to press, and it is present only as a manoeuvre between great powers: Germany and Italy, the book explains, were "surreptitiously landing troops on Spanish territory, in the rear of France", and in reality "they were striking at Great Britain and France". The Spanish working class does not appear. The Republic's internal politics do not appear. The collectivisations in Aragon and Catalonia, the Popular Front, the Barcelona May Days of 1937, the suppression of the POUM and the abduction and murder of Andreu Nin in June 1937, the role of Soviet advisers in all of it — none of it is here. Neither Franco nor Hitler is named anywhere in the book. The reader is given an anti-fascism with no fascists in it and an internationalism with no international.
None of this makes the volume worthless, and a reader told that everything in it is false will be defenceless against it.
The Short Course falsifies chiefly by omission, by re-attribution and by re-categorisation. It rarely fabricates documents. Where it quotes, it usually quotes accurately, and some of what it quotes is not easily found elsewhere in English: the Central Committee resolution of 10 October 1917 on the armed uprising, drafted by Lenin, is given in full; the Tenth Congress resolution on Party Unity of March 1921, with its ban on factions, is quoted at length and fairly, including the passage on Kronstadt; the successive congress delegate counts and membership figures are drawn from official records and are broadly reliable as a record of what the party said about its own size. Lenin's pre-war agrarian journalism is summarised with its statistics intact. On everything in which no faction had a stake — the Second Congress split, the fight with the Economists and the Otzovists, the Duma work, Pravda — the book is a serviceable, if triumphalist, précis of positions that can be checked against the originals.
Chapter Four, section 2, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", deserves separate mention. As philosophy it is a schematic reduction of a rich tradition to a set of numbered features fit for memorisation. As a historical object it is among the most consequential philosophical texts of the century: for a generation of communist intellectuals from Prague to Beijing, this short essay simply was Marxism, and its categories shaped what could be thought in a dozen national traditions for thirty years. You cannot understand mid-century communist intellectual life without reading it.
And there is the Conclusion, which contains, apparently without embarrassment, the sentence: "The Marxist-Leninist theory is not a dogma but a guide to action." It appears in a book that a Central Committee decree had made the compulsory catechism of eight million people. The Short Course is at its most instructive when it is quoting itself.
The answer was already in print before the book was. Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification, published in English in 1937, assembled the 1917 Central Committee minutes and the suppressed documents of the 1920s precisely against the account of October that this volume would canonise; The Revolution Betrayed (1936) supplied the analysis of the bureaucracy that made sense of why such an account was needed. The Dewey Commission's Not Guilty (1938) is the contemporary forensic demolition of the trial evidence. Trotsky himself was killed in Coyoacán on 21 August 1940 by an agent of the NKVD, two years after this book told its readers what he was.
The reply did not stop with his death, nor was it confined to books. Through the whole period in which the Short Course was the operative text, the case against it was made month by month in Fourth International, the magazine published in New York from 1940. It never reviewed the book under its title — the Short Course is not named anywhere in the surviving run — and that is instructive: what it attacked was not a volume but a method, wherever the method surfaced. In December 1940 an unsigned editorial, "Our Lenin", set out the sequence — "the history of the Russian Revolution, the story of Lenin's life, has been rewritten and rewritten at Stalin's behest", in 1923–26 to demote Trotsky, in 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1929 Bukharin, each revision unannounced — and then did to a companion pamphlet, I. Mintz's The October Days 1917, what a reader can do to Chapter Seven of this book. Mintz had explained that neither Lenin nor Stalin spoke at the Congress of Soviets on the night of 25–26 October because both were organising detachments to search Petrograd for grain. Why, the editorial asked, were the two men credited with directing the insurrection spending that night on the work of a minor functionary? Because Stalin had to be placed somewhere, and Lenin had to be placed beside him.
On the trials the magazine was specific rather than indignant. Natalia Sedova Trotsky, answering Joseph Davies, the former United States ambassador who had gone into print defending the verdicts, made the evidentiary point no official history has met: in the Moscow proceedings "not a single fact was established, not a single document was produced, and, in general, not a scrap of material evidence was adduced" ("Mr. Davies and the Moscow Trials", vol. III no. 1, January 1942). The sharpest account of the method itself came from Joseph Hansen in 1950. Checking Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn's The Great Conspiracy, the popular Anglophone restatement of the charges, against a memoir it cited, Hansen found Trotsky's name struck out of the quoted passages and Lenin's put in its place. His conclusion is the one to carry into this volume: it shows "how difficult it is for representatives of Stalinism to touch any page in history, no matter how minor, without responding to the compulsion to deface it. The lie has been elevated into a system that now shapes the thinking of the lowest hack on the payroll." ("Stalin's Frame-Up System", vol. XI no. 4, July–August 1950).
When the book was withdrawn, the same magazine said within weeks why withdrawal would settle nothing. In the spring of 1956 M. Stein observed that the Twentieth Congress had begun rehabilitating the bureaucracy's own dead while leaving the case against Trotsky standing: "Thus in continuing the struggle against Trotskyism it must by that very fact continue to falsify history" ("The End of the Stalin Cult", vol. XVII no. 2, Spring 1956). He was right, and the falsifications outlived the book. When the post-Stalin History of the CPSU appeared to replace it, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain — answered it point by point in "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union", published in two installments in a different journal of the same name — Fourth International, the English-language quarterly of the International Secretariat — nos. 10 and 11. Mandel's method is worth imitating: to show that the new official history still denied Lenin's change of strategic line in April 1917, he quoted Molotov's own article of 1924 — "the party did not have that clarity of vision and that spirit of decision which were required by the revolutionary moment" — and a note in the 1928 Soviet edition of Lenin's Collected Works. The best refutations of the official history were assembled from the official archive.
The Short Course was quietly withdrawn after 1956. There is a last irony in that, which the reader may keep. Pyotr Pospelov, one of the two men who drafted this book, chaired the commission that in 1955–56 investigated the destruction of the Central Committee and prepared the material Khrushchev used in the secret speech. The same hand wrote the charge and, twenty years later, the accounting.