The title page of this book names three authors: Marx, Engels and Lenin. The book contains eight. Counted in words, the largest single contributor to Communist Morality is Nikita Khrushchev, who supplies 10,790 of its roughly 47,000 words of text — more than Marx and Engels together, who supply 6,823, and more than Lenin, who supplies 9,971. Add the extracts from the 1961 Party Programme, which Khrushchev presented, and the sitting First Secretary accounts for very nearly a third of a volume attributed to three men who had been dead for between thirty-eight and seventy-nine years.
The book does not conceal this. Its own blurb promises "the more important statements on problems of communist morality by Marx, Engels, Lenin and prominent Soviet statesmen, including N. S. Khrushchov, M. I. Kalinin, S. M. Kirov and others." The concealment is on the spine, and it is worth naming at the start, because the whole operation of the volume is contained in that gap. This is not an anthology of classical Marxist writing on ethics. It is a device for delivering a document issued in October 1961 — the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism — with a pedigree attached.
The catalogue records 1962. The book's front matter did not survive digitisation: there is no copyright page, no printing history, no translator's note. So the date has to be argued from the inside, and three lines of evidence converge.
The internal terminus is April 1962. The latest dateline printed anywhere in the volume is 14 December 1961, but the contents list two Khrushchev items after it, the last being "From the Speech at the Fourteenth Congress of the Komsomol" — a congress held in April 1962. Nothing in the book postdates it. The imprint is Progress: the back-matter reader's card reads "Progress Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of this book, its translation and design", giving the Zubovsky Boulevard address. Since the brief for this series asked specifically that the imprint be counted, here is the count. "Progress Publishers" occurs once in the text, in that card. "F.L.P.H." also occurs once — but it is not an imprint, it is a footnote citing an edition of "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder. This volume is therefore, unlike two others in this catalogue, genuinely a Progress book and not a Foreign Languages Publishing House book wearing the wrong jacket. Third, the Russian original is visible in the scanned front matter under its own title. The scanner has rendered the Cyrillic in Latin glyphs, but it reconstructs unambiguously as Мораль, как её понимают коммунисты — morality as the communists understand it — which is not what the English spine says either.
The safe statement is this: the manuscript closes in the spring of 1962, and the English edition belongs to the very short window in which Moscow's export house was changing its name. That window is the whole point. In October 1961 the Twenty-Second Congress had adopted a new Party Programme, reopened the denunciation of Stalin begun in 1956, and removed Stalin's body from the Mausoleum. In November 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in Novy Mir. This book was assembled between those two events, and it is a document of that moment in a way that most Progress titles, which lag their originals by years, are not.
Of roughly 120 items in the contents, 98 are marked "From the…" — excerpts. That is over eighty per cent, a far higher proportion than the comparable Lenin anthology in this series, where 18 of about 40 items were cut. Every one of these texts has a canonical version, so the question of what the scissors removed is answerable rather than rhetorical. It was worth answering, and the answer is not the one this series has learned to expect.
Start with the case that goes the other way, because it disciplines everything else. The extract from Anti-Dühring (pp. 30–35) is essentially complete. It prints the three simultaneous moralities — Christian-feudal, bourgeois, and "the proletarian morality of the future" — and Engels's answer to which is true: "Not one of them, in the sense of absolute finality". It prints the derivation of ethical ideas "from the economic relations in which they carry on production and exchange". It prints "Thou shalt not steal" as a historically contingent injunction. And it prints, entire and unabridged, the paragraph one would most expect a Soviet editor of 1962 to lose:
We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations.
It even prints the terminus: a "really human morality" becomes possible only at a stage of society "which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life." Only Engels's personal jibes at Dühring are dropped. That is economy, not suppression, and it must be said plainly.
The same generosity appears where one would least predict it. Lenin's letters to Inessa Armand of January 1915 run to eight pages — the longest single Lenin item in the book — and are printed nearly whole, including the enumerated list of things "free love" might mean, down to "(10) freedom of adultery?", and including the passage preferring "a fleeting passion and liaison" to the "loveless kisses" of a settled marriage. A Soviet volume for the general reader in 1962 did not have to print that. It did.
So the cuts that do bite are the more telling for being selective, and they share a shape.
The German Ideology is absent altogether. Not excerpted, not abridged — the phrase does not occur anywhere in the book, and neither does Feuerbach or Stirner. In an anthology of a hundred and twenty items on communist morality, the one text in which Marx and Engels turn their ridicule on moral preaching itself, rather than on the preaching of other classes, is not represented.
The extract from the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (p. 19) keeps "Religion is the opium of the people" and the surrounding image. It opens after Marx's premises — that the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism, and that man makes religion rather than religion man, neither of which appears anywhere in this book — and it stops before the conclusion, in which criticism ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, and hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased and abandoned being. (I paraphrase the omitted sentences rather than quoting them: marxists.org has withdrawn the Collected Works translation of this Introduction under a copyright claim, and I have not been able to verify their exact wording against a text I hold.) The anti-clerical maxim is kept; the humanist imperative, which is unconditional and addressed to all such relations without a class qualifier, is not.
And the treatment of the speech that is the whole subject's founding text — Lenin to the Third Komsomol Congress, 2 October 1920 — is instructive precisely because the expected censorship is absent. Lenin's repudiation of a morality "derived from God's commandments" is printed. So is "We repudiate all morality taken apart from human society and classes" and "We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the deceit of all the fables about morality." Nothing embarrassing is hidden. What is removed is the reasoning. The book prints:
We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.. .. ... The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to this struggle.
Those four dots cover six consecutive paragraphs of the original, in which Lenin explains what the class struggle at that moment consisted of: the abolition of classes as against the mere expulsion of rulers, the winning-over of the working peasant in order to crush the profiteering one, and the placing of the whole under what he calls the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Lenin the maxim is the conclusion of an argument about a specific society at a specific date. In the anthology it is a free-standing sentence, and the speech as a whole is broken into eight detached fragments, each opening and closing on an ellipsis.
That is the pattern, and it is a pattern rather than three economies: the anthology is open-handed with anti-moralism directed outward — at God, at the clergy, at the bourgeoisie, at eternal truths — and closes its hand on anti-moralism that is unconditional, or that could be turned inward.
Which brings us to the thing the cutting was protecting. Fifty pages after Engels rejects "any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law", the book prints this:
The Party holds that the moral code oi the builder oi communism should comprise the following principles…
— and there follow twelve of them, running from "devotion to the communist cause" to "fraternal solidarity with the working people of all countries". The contradiction is flat, it is fifty pages wide, and no editorial scissors created it. It is legible from the table of contents. What the excisions do is remove the texts a reader might have used to name it.
The word Stalin occurs once in this volume. It occurs inside the phrase "the cult of Stalin's person", in Khrushchev's report to the Twenty-Second Congress of 17 October 1961, and the whole of the book's reckoning with the terror is contained in that one passage of a few hundred words. Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yezhov, Yagoda and Rykov do not appear at all. Those nils are real: I checked them with the project's damage-tolerant name checker and by hand against the standard scan substitutions, and nothing surfaced.
The passage itself repays close reading, because it is candid about the acts and precise about the categories.
The careful analysis and profound study of a number of records, undertaken after the exposure of that inveterate enemy and adventurer, Beria, fully revealed to the Central Committee the flagrant violations of socialist legality, abuses of power, arbitrary acts and repressive measures that had been perpetrated against many honest people, including prominent Party and government officials.
Note the machinery. The crimes are conceded, and in strong words — flagrant violations, arbitrary acts, repressive measures. But the agency is displaced onto Beria, who is expelled from the collective by being classified as "that inveterate enemy and adventurer": not a Bolshevik who did wrong, but an enemy who had got inside. And the victims are "many honest people, including prominent Party and government officials" — a formula which both restricts the injury to the Party's own cadre and quietly leaves room for the others to have been something less than honest.
This is the sharpened form of the test this series applies to Soviet books, and it survives contact with a candid text. Error is admissible here; the category is not. Nobody who stayed inside is ever given the name of the kind of person who does such things. The doer is either an enemy (Beria) or an abstraction (the cult of the individual, which the book treats as a thing that happened rather than a person who acted).
Then comes the reason for the reckoning, and this is the passage that should be read twice, because the book is about morality:
What would have become of the Party and the country had the cult of the individual not been condemned…? The result would have been a cleavage between Party and people, grave violations of Soviet democracy and revolutionary legality, slower economic progress, a lower rate of communist construction and hence a deterioration of the people's standard of living. In the sphere of international relations, the result would have been a weakening of Soviet positions in world affairs and a worsening of relations with other countries…
Every item is a cost to the Party's programme or its standing abroad. The dead are not among them. There is one moral sentence in the passage — "It was a moral requirement, the duty, of the Party and its leadership" — and its object is the disclosure, not the killing. The book is capable of moral language and spends it on the act of admitting.
Two silences complete the picture, and both are the book's own arrangement rather than an accident of period.
Sergei Kirov is given a section, and his dates: "KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH (1886-1934)". That is all. His death is a naked parenthesis in a volume published months after Khrushchev, at the same Twenty-Second Congress the book quotes, had publicly reopened the question of how Kirov died. And Felix Dzerzhinsky, who ran the political police, appears in a book on morality almost entirely as a prisoner and a philanthropist: a diary from Tsarist gaol, letters to his relatives, and an article on rescuing homeless children. His post is given in full euphemism — "permanent Chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Sabotage" — and the footnote defining the Vecheka calls it "an organ of the workers' and peasants' power, to defend the state security of the Soviet Republic", with no mention of the Red Terror.
And yet the book is not sanitised into uplift, which is why it is more interesting than a whitewash. It prints Dzerzhinsky writing that the Cheka should be turned onto child homelessness because it works well and because "People reckon with it. They are rather afraid of it." It prints him promising bribe-takers a tribunal "whose punitive hammer will fall with all the devastating might and anger of which it is capable". Kalinin is printed on the qualities of the new socialist man over a dateline of 28 December 1938, at the close of the Yezhov years, and the book supplies no gloss. The coercion is on the page. What is missing is any vocabulary in which it could be judged.
The last item in the volume is Khrushchev at the Fourteenth Komsomol Congress in the spring of 1962, and it shows what the Moral Code was for. He praises the Komsomol for taking the code as its basis, calls it "imbued with noble ideas of humanism and collectivism", quotes its warmest principles — "One for all and all for one!", "Man is to man a friend, comrade and brother" — and then, within the same passage, turns them round:
We must intensify the struggle against the idlers, against all sorts of swindlers, hooligans and antisocial elements… Our task is to rid society of such people…
This is the book's true classifying vocabulary, and it is worth noting that the older one has almost vanished. Opportunism occurs three times in the whole volume and every occurrence is inside Lenin's own text or an editorial footnote about Lenin; no Soviet editor uses it in his own voice, and revisionism, dogmatism and sectarianism are at zero. What has replaced them is moral rather than political: parasites, idlers, spongers, swindlers, hooligans, anti-social elements, survivals of capitalism in the minds of people. A code of twelve virtues, in a state, is also a schedule of twelve offences, and the volume closes by saying so.
One further detail deserves its own sentence, because it is the whole book in miniature. The subject index carries the entry "Personality cult, its criticism-29 , 187-190". Page 29 is Marx's letter to Wilhelm Blos of 1877 — "Because I am opposed to every kind of personality cult, during the existence of the International I have never allowed to be made public the numerous messages, expressing recognition of my services, with which I was pestered from various countries." Pages 187–190 are Khrushchev on Stalin. The index files them under one heading, and in doing so converts a rupture into a continuity: not a party discovering in 1956 what it had done, but a doctrine that had always held the correct view and was now restating it.
A reader told that all of this is worthless learns nothing. The translations are good and in several cases the volume is the most accessible English source for what it prints. The Anti-Dühring extract is a clean and generous presentation of the single best short statement of the historical-materialist account of morality, and it is printed without the cuts one would predict. The Armand letters are here in a fullness that Soviet publishing did not owe anyone in 1962. Dzerzhinsky's prison diary is a real document by a man who spent eleven years in Tsarist gaols and wrote well about it. Krupskaya's recollections include a small, unforced detail — Lenin going through back numbers of journals to defend a colleague unjustly attacked during a party purge — that no propagandist would have invented, because it concedes that party purges attacked people unjustly.
And the underlying philosophical claim is not a cynicism. That moral codes have a class history, that "Thou shalt not steal" presupposes property to steal, that an ethics claiming to stand outside society is usually the ethics of somebody in particular — these are serious positions, argued by Engels with more care than most of his critics have brought against him, and this book puts the argument in a reader's hands.
The difficulty is not the argument. It is that the argument is used here to license exactly what it forbids.
The tradition this series writes from produced its own major text on this precise question, and we hold it. Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours was published in The New International vol. IV no. 6, June 1938, pp. 163–173 — the pre-split, orthodox Trotskyist New International, before the magazine went with Shachtman's minority in April 1940, so it can be cited without qualification as the tradition's own. It was written against the charge that Bolshevism and Stalinism shared an amoralism, and it concedes the premise the Progress volume rests on:
…morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.
That is the same proposition as Engels's, and the same one this book prints. What Trotsky then does is the thing the anthology's cuts make impossible. He asks what follows, and answers that it is not permission:
"We are to understand then that in achieving this end anything is permissible?" sarcastically demands the Philistine, demonstrating that he understood nothing. That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation of mankind.
Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible.
And on the regime this book speaks for, in 1938, while the trials were running:
Stalinism reestablished the most offensive forms of privileges, imbued inequality with a provocative character, strangled mass self-activity under police absolutism, transformed administration into a monopoly of the Kremlin oligarchy and regenerated the fetishism of power in forms that absolute monarchy dared not dream of.
Verily boundless intellectual and moral obtuseness is required to identify the reactionary police morality of Stalinism with the revolutionary morality of the Bolsheviks.
The tradition did not agree with itself about this, and the disagreement is worth showing rather than smoothing. John Dewey, who had chaired the commission of inquiry into the Moscow Trials and whose verdict Trotsky cites gratefully in the same essay, replied in The New International two months later. He granted the ground — "I hold that the end in the sense of consequences provides the only basis for moral ideas and action" — and then objected that Trotsky derived his means not from examining their actual consequences but from "an alleged law of history which is the law of all laws of social development", concluding: "in avoiding one kind of absolutism Mr. Trotsky has plunged into another kind of absolutism." (Our copy of Dewey's reply carries no volume or issue line of its own; the August 1938 attribution comes from the index.)
There is also a contemporaneous answer to this book's actual occasion. George Novack, writing as William F. Warde, reviewed the 1961 Draft Programme in the International Socialist Review in the autumn of that year, and identified the manoeuvre the anthology exists to perform:
And despite the silence on Stalin, it reaffirms and formally sanctions the cardinal points where Stalinism broke with Bolshevism.
Murry Weiss followed in the same journal, vol. 23 no. 1, Winter 1962, on the Congress itself — "Stalin had to be exhumed from the Lenin Tomb at Red Square" — and drew the sociological conclusion the Progress volume cannot draw, that what had been disclosed was "not bureaucratic errors or bureaucratic crimes but a social and historical development of a parasitic bureaucratic caste."
Two honest qualifications. Novack's article is misfiled in our index: it is placed at vol. 22 no. 4, Fall 1961, while the article's own provenance line says vol. 22 no. 3. I have not resolved that and cite it by season only. And the specific object of this book — the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism — appears to have gone unanswered by name: a search of the whole International Socialist Review run returns no article treating it. That is a fact about our holdings, not a verdict on the book.
The sharpest anticipation is older than any of them. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1936, describing the reversal on the family, Trotsky wrote that "The stupid and stale prejudices of uncultured philistines are resurrected in the name of a new morale", and that "The Soviet moralists have only to change the phraseology slightly." Twenty-five years later the phraseology was changed, printed in twelve numbered clauses, bound between Engels's rejection of all immutable moral law and a call to rid society of idlers, and issued in English under the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
That is what this book is, and it is why it is worth reading. It is the most complete surviving statement of what the Soviet state, at the one moment when it was telling part of the truth about itself, wanted morality to mean.