Molotov opened the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) on 10 March 1939 with a piece of arithmetic. "Comrades, 1,574 delegates with vote have been elected to the Congress, of whom 1,567 are present." Then the applause, and the declaration that the congress was open.
Five years and one month earlier, the Seventeenth Congress had met in the same hall and called itself the Congress of Victors. Of the 1,966 delegates to that congress, Khrushchev told the Twentieth Congress in February 1956, 1,108 were arrested on counter-revolutionary charges; of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee it elected, 98 were shot. That is the fact this book exists to talk around. The Eighteenth Congress is the first congress of the surviving party, and this volume — the reports and speeches, issued in English in Moscow in the same year as the Short Course — is the record of what the survivors said to each other about it.
The two books are one operation in two forms. The Short Course, authorised by the Central Committee in 1938, supplied the history that made the killings intelligible. This volume, produced from the congress that met the following March, supplies the present tense: the same men, the new plan, the party rules rewritten, the Third Five-Year Plan, and the announcement that the thing is over. That the two are a matched pair can be read off the back of this book without any commentary at all. In the list of the Central Committee elected by the Eighteenth Congress, printed here in full, sit "Pospelov, P. N." and "Yaroslavsky, E." — the two men who drafted the Short Course, promoted into the body that had authorised it. Also on that list: "Vyshinsky, A. Y.", who had prosecuted the Moscow trials, and "Beria, L. P.", who had run the NKVD since the previous November. The volume is not a commentary on the Terror. It is a group photograph of the people who conducted it, taken while they were still in the room.
Read the speakers' list as a document in its own right. Molotov opens and delivers the Third Five-Year Plan. Stalin reports for the Central Committee. Manuilsky reports for the Soviet delegation to the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Zhdanov moves the amendments to the party rules. Then Andreyev, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Beria, Shvernik. Twelve men. Every one of them died in bed or in office.
Now the absences. Rudzutak, a full member of the Politburo, had been shot in July 1938. Postyshev, Kosior and Chubar — all three Politburo members or candidates who had sat on the platform in 1934 — were shot on 26 February 1939, twelve days before this congress opened. Eikhe was in prison and would be shot in 1940. None of them is named anywhere in this volume. Neither, more remarkably, is Nikolai Yezhov, who had directed the mass operations of 1937 and 1938 and whose name does not occur once in this volume. He had been replaced at the NKVD by Beria in November 1938 and was arrested a month after the congress closed. The man who ran the Terror is the one figure the congress justifying the Terror cannot mention.
The names were not unmentionable everywhere. Trotsky's survey of the whole process, written in 1938 and printed in English in Fourth International (vol. VI no. 3, March 1945), puts the point this book exists to prevent anyone putting: that the contradiction between October and the bureaucracy "found its most dramatic expression in the annihilation of the old generation of the Bolsheviks", and that no serious person believed "that hundreds of old revolutionists, leaders of the Bolshevik Party under [Czarist] illegality, leaders of the Civil War, revolutionary Soviet diplomats, military heads of the Red Army, heads of 30 national Soviet Republics, became all at once and as if by command-agents of fascism." He then does the thing the congress cannot do, and lists them: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Pyatakov, Serebryakov, Sokolnikov, Radek, Rakovsky, Krestinsky, Tukhachevsky "and hundreds of others".
Two men from the Seventeenth Congress are named here with warmth, and it is worth noticing which two. Kaganovich, arguing about the railways, recalls that "the backward state of the railways was sharply emphasized in the speeches of Comrades Molotov, Kirov and Orjonikidze", and refers a few pages later to "our late Comrade Orjonikidze". Kirov was murdered in December 1934. Ordzhonikidze died in February 1937, in circumstances the party did not then discuss. They can be praised because they were dead before they could be charged. Everyone else who spoke at the Congress of Victors has become unmentionable, and the book does not explain why, because explaining why would require naming them.
The congress does address the purges, and the language is worth having exactly. Molotov, in the opening speech, gives the official theory in a single sentence: the foreign powers had attempted "a sort of intervention in our internal affairs", conducted through "people who but yesterday covered up their vile perfidy and treason with the Communist Party membership card they carried". Their method, he says, "in which all these Trotskys, Rykovs, Bukharins, Zinovievs, Tukhachevskys, Radeks, Ikramovs and Lubchenkos played the contemptible role of wrecker stool pigeons and filthy agents of foreign espionage services, has suffered complete shipwreck."
Stalin's report handles the same material as a debating point against the foreign press:
Certain foreign pressmen have been talking drivel to the effect that the purging of the Soviet organizations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Bukharin and other fiends has "shaken" the Soviet system and caused its "demoralization." One can only laugh at such cheap drivel.
The proof offered is electoral, and the passage should be read slowly, because it is the whole regime's theory of legitimacy in five lines:
In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. were held. In these elections, 98.6 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power. At the beginning of 1938 Rosengoltz, Rykov, Bukharin and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics were held. In these elections 99.4 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power.
An unopposed single-list ballot is offered as the audit of a series of executions. The three generals named in the first sentence — Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich — were tried in secret and shot in June 1937, together with most of the Soviet high command, on evidence that no historian now defends. All the principal defendants of the 1936–38 Moscow trials had their convictions quashed by the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1988.
Then comes the admission, and it is a real one, of a narrow kind. Discussing the party purge that ran from 1933 to 1936, Stalin says: "It cannot be said that the purge was not accompanied by grave mistakes. There were unfortunately more mistakes than might have been expected." Two sentences later: "Nevertheless, the purge of 1933-36 was unavoidable and its results, on the whole, were beneficial." The membership figures are given plainly: 1,874,488 members represented at the Seventeenth Congress, "about 1,600,000" at the Eighteenth, "which is 270,000 less than were represented at the Seventeenth Congress. But there is nothing bad in that."
Note the dates in that admission. The purge conceded is the one that ended in 1936. The mass operations of 1937 and 1938, in which something on the order of 680,000 people were executed according to the NKVD's own accounting released from the archives in the 1990s, are not what is being apologised for; they are the "purging of Soviet organizations" that the same report defends as an unmixed good.
The most extraordinary passage in the book on this subject is not Stalin's but Zhdanov's, in the section of his report headed "Abolition of Mass Purges". Zhdanov is arguing that the mass purge as an instrument should be written out of the party rules, and to make the case he describes, in detail and at length, what actually happened in the party organisations during 1937 and 1938. A district secretary named Kalyakaikin expelled 58 of the 175 members of his organisation, using what Zhdanov calls a "belt" system: expel a man, then call to account "all Communists who had had any relations whatever with the expelled person". A man named Priluchny in Archangel "had filed statements against one hundred and forty-two Communists, not a single one of which was substantiated". A woman named Peskovskaya in Aktyubinsk Region "brought about the expulsion from the Party of one hundred and fifty-six Communists, or sixty-four per cent of the membership of the organization". A party consultant in Krasnoyarsk Territory kept a denunciation ledger with four columns: "big enemy"; "little enemy"; "wee enemy"; "tiny enemy." The congress laughs. The stenographer records the laughter.
Zhdanov's summary is that "the slandering of honest people under the guise of 'vigilance' is at the present time the most widespread method used to mask and screen hostile activities. If you want to discover still unexposed enemy wasps' nests, look for them above all among the slanderers." That is the trap sprung shut. The denunciations were real; the ruined lives were real; Zhdanov describes them with precision. But the denunciations are attributed to the enemy, so that the machinery of terror becomes further evidence of the conspiracy that terror was needed to defeat. The remedy is more unmasking. The congress duly resolves that "periodical mass purges of the Party shall be abolished" — and the whole apparatus of individual investigation is left standing, under a new commissar.
Stalin's report closes with a section called "Some Questions of Theory", and this is the part of the volume with the longest afterlife. He takes the classical passage from Engels on the withering away of the state and argues that it holds only if socialism has triumphed in all or most countries. In one country, encircled, the state must instead be strengthened, "must have at its disposal a well-trained army, well-organized punitive organs, and a strong intelligence service".
He then periodises. In the second phase, from the elimination of the capitalist elements to the new Constitution:
The function of military suppression inside the country ceased, died away; for exploitation had been abolished, there were no more exploiters left, and so there was no one to suppress.
And of the coercive organs: "their edge is no longer turned to the inside of the country but to the outside, against external enemies."
This was said in March 1939, to a hall from which more than a thousand of the previous congress's delegates were missing, by the head of a state then holding well over a million people in corrective-labour camps and colonies. It is not a lie about a fact; it is a definition constructed so that no fact can reach it. Repression that is directed at spies is by definition not internal suppression, because spies are not a class. Trotsky's reply, written within weeks — the essay published as "The Bonapartist Philosophy of the State" — fastened on exactly this: that a state which must be strengthened without limit in the name of a classless society has told you what class it serves. The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had already supplied the framework, and The Stalin School of Falsification (English edition, 1937) the documentary method. Trotsky was killed in Coyoacán on 21 August 1940 by an NKVD agent, seventeen months after this congress. The doctrine outlived him and hardened. Reading the Soviet press seven years later, Fourth International (vol. VII no. 4, April 1946) quoted Pravda of 22 January 1946 announcing that "the greatest theoretical and political conquest of Leninism" was "the doctrine of the development and strengthening of the state under socialism and communism in the conditions of the victory of socialism in one country", and drew the inference: it was now "counterrevolutionary" to cite in the USSR "not alone Marx and Engels but also Lenin on the withering away of the state." What is offered here as an emendation of Engels had become, inside a decade, a prohibition on reading him.
Now the calendar, because this congress sits in one of the tightest corners of the century. It opened on 10 March 1939. On 15 March, while it was still sitting, German troops entered Prague and destroyed what was left of Czechoslovakia. It closed on 21 March. On 28 March, Madrid fell to Franco. On 31 March, Britain guaranteed Poland. On 3 May, Litvinov — elected to the Central Committee by this congress, his name printed in the list at the back — was dismissed as Foreign Commissar and replaced by Molotov. On 23 August, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a pact of non-aggression.
Stalin's foreign-policy section is therefore read backwards by everyone who reads it. He describes the Western powers as pursuing non-intervention in order to see Germany and the USSR exhaust each other: they let Hitler have Austria and the Sudetenland, he says, "egging the Germans on to march farther east, promising them easy pickings, and prompting them: 'Just start war on the Bolsheviks, and everything will be all right.'" On the press campaign about German designs on Soviet Ukraine, he is contemptuous and funny — "It is quite possible, of course, that there are madmen in Germany who dream of annexing the elephant, that is, the Soviet Ukraine, to the gnat, namely, the so-called Carpathian Ukraine" — and he closes the section with the sentence that has been quoted ever since. Among the tasks of the party in foreign policy:
To be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.
Whether that was a coded offer to Berlin is genuinely contested and probably unresolvable. Ribbentrop and German commentators later treated it as the first signal; a number of historians read it more modestly, as a warning to London and Paris that Soviet participation in an anti-German front could not be assumed after Munich. What is not contested is that the analysis is, on its own terms, largely accurate — appeasement really was in part an attempt to turn Germany eastwards — and that Stalin's conclusion was not to build the anti-fascist alliance the Comintern was simultaneously demanding, but to keep both doors open. He also says, of the policy of non-intervention: "Far be it from me to moralize on the policy of non-intervention, to talk of treason, treachery and so on. It would be naive to preach morals to people who recognize no human morality. Politics is politics." Five months later the same reasoning was applied in the other direction.
One contemporaneous reader took the Ukraine passage as the load-bearing one. Trotsky's "Problem of the Ukraine", dated 22 April 1939 and first printed in the Socialist Appeal of 9 May 1939 — reprinted in Fourth International, vol. X no. 10, November 1949 — notes that Hitler had just handed Carpatho-Ukraine "as a gift to the Hungarian butchers", and reads that as a message: "If I were preparing to attack Soviet Ukraine tomorrow I should have kept Carpatho-Ukraine in my own hands." Hence, Trotsky writes, "In reply, Stalin at the 18th Party Congress openly came to Hitler's defense against the slanders of the 'Western Democracies.'" On that reading the elephant-and-gnat joke is not comic relief but an answer given in public to a question asked in public. It was written a month after the congress rose and four months before the pact, by a man with access to neither chancellery.
What the pact then bought was audited from the Soviet press itself. John G. Wright, working from Pravda files that reached New York a year late, opened his account in Fourth International (vol. II no. 9, November 1941) with the claim he meant to destroy: "One of Stalin's most brazen lies is that by signing the pact with Hitler he had gained and used precious breathing space to bolster the industry and defenses of the USSR." From Malenkov's report to the Eighteenth Party Conference of February 1941 he took the cement figures — capacity rising every year from 1936 to 1940, capacity actually used falling from 88 per cent to 64 — and concluded that "the chaos into which Stalin had plunged the country was known to Hitler." His sequel (vol. II no. 10, December 1941) records what became of the men elected here: at that same conference "six members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (among them Maxim Litvinov), 15 alternates and 9 members of the Central Auditing Commission were expelled on the charge of 'incompetence' and 'failure to fulfill their duties.'" The Central Committee list printed at the back of this volume had a working life of under two years.
Manuilsky's report on the Comintern shows the cost. It is, for its first fifty pages, a serious and even moving account of the anti-fascist movement: the Popular Front victories, the International Brigades, the "tens of thousands of Communists who are languishing in prisons and concentration camps", and the Spanish Republic which, "betrayed by the so-called bourgeois-democratic states, has been waging an unequal and heroic struggle for its independence". Britain and France had recognised Franco on 27 February; the Republic had a fortnight to live as Manuilsky spoke. And then the same report explains that "in Spain the Trotskyites act as spies for fascist Germany and Italy and as agents of the Fifth Column, engineering counter-revolutionary revolts in the rear of the People's Army." That sentence is the charge under which the POUM was suppressed after the Barcelona May Days of 1937 and under which Andreu Nin was abducted and murdered in June 1937 by agents working with Soviet advisers. Manuilsky repeats it to a Soviet party congress five weeks before the Republic's surrender. Whatever the Comintern was for by 1939, this report is the evidence. Trotsky, in the same April 1939 article, drew from it the conclusion a Soviet reader could not: that "Manuilsky, one of the most revolting renegades of Ukrainian communism, quite openly explained that not only the USSR but also the Comintern ... refused to demand the emancipation of oppressed peoples whenever their oppressors are not the enemies of the ruling Moscow clique." Western Ukraine, on that showing, had become "small change in its international combinations with imperialist governments."
A reader who concludes that everything in this book is false will have learned nothing and will be unable to explain why the volume worked.
Much of it is not false. The Third Five-Year Plan, presented by Molotov and printed here with the congress resolution, is a genuine planning document and the best English-language source for what Soviet planners intended between 1938 and 1942: the targets for machine-building, electric power, the "Second Baku" oilfield between the Volga and the Urals, the fuel and railway programmes argued over at length by Kaganovich. Stalin's comparison of Soviet and British output per head is honest arithmetic used against his own case — 87 kilograms of pig iron per head in the USSR against 145 in Great Britain, 107 kilograms of steel against 226 — and the conclusion drawn from it, that the USSR had overtaken the capitalist countries in rate of growth but not in economic power, is a fair statement of the position. The industrialisation these pages describe happened. So did the expansion of schooling: the plan's commitment that "full secondary education be made universal in the cities and towns, and that education up to and including the seventh class be made universal in the rural districts and in all the national republics", and the projected rise in personnel with higher education from 750,000 to 1,290,000, describe a real and rapid transformation, whatever one thinks of the regime that carried it out and of the human cost recorded nowhere in this book. Where the volume is checkable against later Soviet and post-Soviet statistics, its industrial series are broadly the series the planners themselves worked from; they are propaganda in their framing, not in their arithmetic. The population figure Stalin cites — 170,000,000 — comes from the January 1939 census, taken after the census of January 1937 had been suppressed and several of its organisers arrested for producing a total the leadership would not accept.
The volume is also, unlike the Short Course, a book in which the Communist International exists. Manuilsky's survey of the sections — the growth of the French party, the weakness of the British and Italian parties, the losses under fascism — is a source, and the party rules adopted here still describe the CPSU(B) on their title page as a "Section of the Communist International", four years before that International was dissolved.
And there is the congress's own closing note, which no critic could improve on. Beria, newly installed at the NKVD, ends his speech to the applause of the delegates with a salute — and the stenographer takes down the shout from the floor: "Long live the Soviet intelligence service, hurrah!" Two months earlier, three of the men who had sat in that hall in 1934 had been shot. The congress cheered the organisation that shot them, and passed on to the Third Five-Year Plan.