The preface to this book is two pages long and it does something the Short Course never did: it names the authors. The second edition, it says, was prepared principally by O. V. Kuusinen, "leader of the group of authors", with Arbatov, Belyakov, Vygodsky, Mileikovsky and Sheydin, and revisions to individual chapters by Burlatsky, Ivanov, Leibzon, Makarovsky and Sitkovsky. It states plainly what the revision was for: the book has been "enriched by the valuable new ideas" of the Programme of the CPSU adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961, and by the conclusions of the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties of 1960. This is a commissioned textbook, revised to a specification, and it says so.
The specification matters, and so does the man at the head of the list. Otto Wille Kuusinen was one of the leaders of the Finnish workers' revolution of January 1918; he fled to Soviet Russia when it was crushed, spent the interwar decades as a secretary of the Communist International, headed the puppet "Finnish Democratic Republic" set up at Terijoki during the Winter War, and — almost uniquely among the Comintern's foreign cadre — survived the years in which most of his colleagues were shot. By 1961 he sat on the Presidium and the Secretariat of the Central Committee, one of the very few men alive who had known Lenin and now served Khrushchev. He died in 1964, the year after this English edition appeared. He is the connective tissue between the two régimes, and this book is the doctrine he was asked to write for the second.
The English text is credited to Clemens Dutt, brother of R. Palme Dutt of the British party. His name is on the title page and nowhere in the seven hundred pages that follow; the rendering is careful, idiomatic and unshowy, and it is one of the reasons this volume mattered.
Date the text, not the spine. The English appeared in 1963; the manuscript behind it did not. Its footnotes cite the Foreign Languages Publishing House — F.L.P.H., a hundred and seventy-five times — and Progress Publishers not once, in the very year the one became the other. The list of quoted literature runs to 447 items and stops dead in 1962, which is also by far its heaviest year: 78 references, against 30 for 1961. Not one item is dated 1963. The latest event anywhere in the book is the Twenty-Second Congress of October 1961, and its standing proposal on Germany is still to "turn West Berlin into a demilitarised free city". Nothing in these 316,000 words knows that the Cuban missile crisis has happened. A manuscript closed in 1962 thus reached English readers in 1963 telling them that war is no longer fatally inevitable — months after the autumn in which many of them had wondered whether there would be a 1963 at all. The book's confidence was overtaken between the typesetting and the shelf.
Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism was the Short Course's replacement. When the 1938 history was quietly withdrawn after 1956, the world movement was left without a catechism, and this is what filled the gap: over three hundred thousand words, in twenty-seven chapters, running from the concept of matter to the future of communist society. It is the largest and most ambitious thing the Moscow house ever put into English, and for a generation of Communist Party members in Britain, India, Australia and the United States it simply was Marxism. That is the reason to read it now. It is also the reason to read it against the book it replaced.
Begin with the arithmetic. Stalin is named twenty-seven times in this book. The passage that accounts for what he did — the whole reckoning, from "J. V. Stalin, for instance, rose to a position of leadership" to the conclusion that Soviet successes "would have been even greater but for Stalin's mistakes and the cult of the individual" — runs to about 515 words. In a book of more than 300,000, the years 1934 to 1953 are settled in a page and a half.
What that page and a half says is worth quoting, because it is the high-water mark of official de-Stalinisation in a text meant for export:
This gave rise to certain phenomena which were deeply alien to Marxism-Leninism and socialism as a social system: departure from democratic principles in a number of important questions of policy, grave violations of socialist legality, mass acts of repression against honest Soviet people, the promotion to important posts of certain people completely unsuitable for the Party and alien to it, who wormed their way into positions of trust by means of flattery and servility.
Note the adjective. Honest Soviet people were repressed. The sentence is constructed so that the reader may continue to believe that the others — the dishonest ones, the ones the Short Course had called spies and wreckers — got what was coming to them. Nothing in the book disturbs that belief, because nothing in the book returns to the subject.
Set beside the Short Course, though, the subtractions are enormous and they are real. Lenin's suppressed dictation of 1922–23 is here, quoted directly — "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless authority in his hands", "Stalin is too harsh" — although the word Testament never appears and the reader is not told that the document was withheld from the party for thirty years or that its operative proposal was Stalin's removal. Trotsky, who in 1938 had been the organising demon of Soviet history, is not named once in this volume. The Trotskyists appear three times, and appear as politicians who held a mistaken position: they "denied the dual nature of the peasantry and claimed it was a wholly reactionary mass incapable of taking part in building socialism". Wrong, in the book's view; not spies. Bukharin is named twice, as the source of an erroneous line on the peasantry, in the phrase "The Right-wing opportunists, followers of Bukharin", and not as a traitor. Zinoviev survives only in the adjective Zinovievists.
This is the single largest doctrinal change between 1938 and 1963, and it should be stated precisely, because it is easy to overstate in either direction. The reclassification of political opposition as espionage — the Short Course's characteristic method — has been abandoned. But the Moscow Trials have not been repudiated. They have been deleted. Search this book for Kirov, for the NKVD, for Yagoda or Yezhov or Vyshinsky, for a confession, an arrest or an execution, and you will find nothing. The word innocent does not occur. Rehabilitation occurs three times: of Keynes's proposals for capitalism, of peasant farms under the New Economic Policy, and of the Soviet economy after the civil war. Never of a person — in a book written while the commissions were sitting. The only people described as shot in these 300,000 words are the demonstrators fired on by the Provisional Government in July 1917 and the defeated Finnish Reds of 1918, of whom the book reports that "some 20,000 people, according to official statistics, were either shot or done to death in the concentration camps". The book can be exact about a white terror in Helsinki. About a red one in Moscow it has no vocabulary at all. It is hard to read that sentence without thinking of the man whose name heads the list of authors, and of the comrades he lost in 1918 and the comrades he lost twenty years later.
The other silences follow the pattern of the book it replaced. There is no famine. The word does not occur once in 316,000 words — though hunger, starvation and starving occur seventeen times between them, and every single one is about capitalism, colonialism or feudalism. The manual has the vocabulary. It simply has no occasion to use it at home. Collectivisation is expounded as doctrine, with a long and genuinely faithful account of Lenin's co-operative plan and a warning against any attempt "to violate the Leninist principle of complete voluntariness" — and no acknowledgement anywhere that the Soviet Union violated it. On the fate of the kulaks (well-to-do peasants) the manual offers a formula of some delicacy: "It is not a question, of course, of the physical destruction of the representatives of this class, but of the abolition of the social and economic conditions" that allowed them to exploit — after which, because they resisted, "the peasant masses and the proletarian government were compelled to take measures to suppress them." What those measures were is not said. Well over a million and a half people were deported to "special settlements" in 1930–31 alone, and excess deaths in the famine of 1932–33 are generally placed at five to seven million across the USSR, concentrated in Ukraine, the Kuban and Kazakhstan; historians remain genuinely divided over whether the Ukrainian catastrophe is best described as a genocide or as the lethal result of grain extraction pursued without regard to who died. None of it is here.
The year 1937 appears exactly twice in this book. Both times it is a production statistic: by 1937, the reader learns, 98.7 per cent of production facilities were public property, and "in 1937 this class group disappeared completely." The class group is the capitalists. The sentence is true in its own terms. It is also, in that year, a sentence about people.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact does not appear. Hungary in 1956 appears five times, and it is the fifth that matters. Four are formulae: "the counterrevolutionary revolt in Hungary in October 1956", filed alongside the fourteen-power intervention of 1918 and the armed provocations against Cuba as evidence of imperialist method; and "the unanimous support the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries rendered the working people of Hungary during the counter-revolutionary uprising provoked by foreign imperialism", which is how the manual describes the invasion. The fifth is not a formula but a lesson. Weighing the balance a socialist state must strike between persuasion and coercion, the book writes: "The 1956 events in Hungary give an idea of the consequences that may result from a violation of this principle. Reactionary onslaughts there were not suppressed resolutely enough, while at the same time the democratic rights of the working people were seriously infringed." A rising in which several thousand people died, and after which Imre Nagy was tried in secret and hanged, is entered in the ledger as a case of insufficient repression. Nagy is not named. The Communist International, to which most of this book's readers' parties had belonged, is mentioned once by that name, in a paragraph explaining that by 1943 it had "outlived its usefulness".
The interesting question is not what the book omits but how it is built so that the omissions hold. The answer is in Chapter 6, "The Role of the Masses and the Individual in History", where the cult of the individual is theorised as a problem of personal character. Stalin possessed the qualities of a leader and also "other personal traits which, though secondary, may in certain circumstances have a harmful influence". The circumstances were difficult. The traits got worse. Therefore:
Stalin's violation of these standards was in direct contradiction to the laws of life of socialist society and was not at all a result of them.
And therefore: "These negative phenomena did not, of course, change the socialist nature of Soviet society." The Twentieth Congress becomes not a reckoning but a credential — "an act of great political courage, a new proof of the high political maturity of the C.P.S.U." A killing apparatus operated for two decades and the institution that operated it emerges from the analysis with its authority enhanced.
Watch what happens next. Chapter 13 reaffirms democratic centralism and the Tenth Congress ban on factions in full — and then uses it. The anti-Party group of 1957, "a handful of ossified conservatives, who had hopelessly sullied themselves in the past, and were fearful of personal responsibility for crimes committed by them in the period of the cult of Stalin's personality", is condemned for "violating the resolution of the Tenth Congress". Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov are the only individuals in this book accused by name of crimes, and the charge against them is factionalism. The book condemns Stalin, defends without qualification the organisational mechanism that made Stalin possible, and turns that mechanism against the survivors of his Politburo. It is a closed circle, and the book does not notice it.
The same architecture governs the treatment of the state. Following the 1961 Programme, the dictatorship of the proletariat has "fulfilled its historic mission" and the Soviet state has "become a state of the entire people"; the chief function of the state, class suppression, is declared to have disappeared. Coercion is now applied only "against individuals who violate the laws of socialist society". The withering away of the state, the book says, "is, in effect, already going on" — written in 1962, in a country with a functioning political-prisoner system, by authors who three chapters later explain that the state must retain organs to combat "spies, saboteurs, and other subversive elements sent in by the imperialists". The theory of the withering-away is stated accurately and at length, out of Engels and Lenin, and then attached to a state that was doing nothing of the kind. That is the characteristic operation of this book: the doctrine is often correct and the referent is false.
Watch the move made once more, on the one category that could have pointed homeward. The manual is not evasive about bureaucracy in the abstract. It warns against "formalism and callousness, separation from the masses and red tape"; it quotes Lenin distinguishing democratic from bureaucratic centralism; it grants that "Centralism without democracy or with inadequately developed democracy results in deadening bureaucracy." Then it closes the question in one sentence: "It is obvious that bureaucracy is not an inherent feature of the working-class state, for this state is established by the people, serves its interests and is under its control." Obvious — by definition. And whatever bureaucracy remains has an external origin: "Bureaucratic distortions under the proletarian dictatorship are survivals of the capitalist system." A privileged administrative stratum with interests of its own is not argued against here. It is ruled out in advance by the terms in which the subject is set up.
A comprehensive manual is the fairest place to test that habit, because like a dictionary it must state its categories in the abstract, where they can be inspected. Two questions are worth putting. First: is a deviation ever cashed out into a specified act that could be shown not to have happened? Sometimes, and it should be said plainly. The charge against the Yugoslav revisionists is quoted from the League of Communists' own programme — that in capitalism today there appear "new elements in the economy which are socialist in their objective tendency". The charge against the liquidators after 1905 is a checkable claim about a named proposal to replace the party with a "labour association". Those are refutable, and refutable is the standard.
The definitions are another matter. "Whatever form it may take, opportunism always aims — frankly or in a disguised manner — at reconciling the working class to capitalism": frankly or in disguise, so nothing observable can count against it. "The danger of revisionism is precisely that it rejects Marxism under the guise of developing it" — which converts any proposed development into evidence. Which brings the second and decisive question: could the category, as this book defines it, ever apply to the author's own side? It could not, and the manual says why in the passage that opens the subject. Opportunism reaches a Communist Party from outside it. The bourgeoisie "pins great hopes on utilising for its aims inner-Party differences"; the ranks grow with "people insufficiently mature politically", from "different intermediate strata", who "bring their prejudices and delusions into the Party"; and so "bourgeois and petty-bourgeois influences, various opportunist views, despondent moods and disbelief in victory may penetrate into the Communist Parties." Penetrate — from without. The Party combats the disease and cannot be its source, exactly as socialist society could not generate Stalin and a workers' state cannot generate a bureaucracy.
None of this is an argument about how often the words appear; the counts here are unremarkable, and the vocabulary is not a Soviet monopoly — the Fourth International's own congress documents use the same terms at much the same rate. What separates them is whether the charge can be turned around. Those documents record a section's dated self-criticism ("The POR accepted that criticism in its self-criticism of April 1, 1972") and warn that the International's own youth work might "transmit into the Fourth International itself the pressures coming from a petty-bourgeois social origin". In three hundred thousand words defining the party, democratic centralism, the state and bureaucracy, this manual contains not one sentence that could ever be read against the C.P.S.U. Note too which word carries the load: opportunism and its cognates occur 56 times, revisionism and its cognates 82. The label that grew was the one aimed at people who claimed to be developing Marxism.
The date explains the rest. When this English edition appeared, the Sino-Soviet quarrel had become open warfare, and the manual fights it in the only way a doctrinal textbook can — by naming a proxy. China is praised throughout: Mao is quoted with respect on what the October Revolution brought to Asia, the land reform of 1949–52 is described admiringly. The Albanian Party of Labour takes the beating instead, condemned for nationalism advanced "under cover of 'revolutionary' phraseology". The general charge is filed under "Dogmatism and Sectarianism Lead to Isolation from the Masses": "Instead of studying actual life, dogmatists proceed from a scheme, and if the facts do not fit into the scheme they ignore the facts." Peking knew precisely who was meant, and said so.
The doctrines Peking attacked as revisionism are all here, and they are set out with more care than their opponents usually allowed. War is no longer "fatally inevitable". A peaceful transition to socialism is now possible; the Twentieth Congress resolution is quoted at length, concluding that the working class may "win a solid majority in parliament and turn it from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people's will". But the chapter that develops this is not the complacent thing its critics described. It warns against "parliamentary cretinism"; it insists that the parliamentary road "ensures transition to socialism only if it is supported by the mass revolutionary movement"; it observes that ruling classes faced with defeat "introduce crafty electoral systems, curtail the rights of the parliament"; and it states flatly that if they refuse to submit, "the peaceful course of the revolution may become non-peaceful." Ten years later, in Santiago, every one of those warnings was vindicated and every one of them had been ignored by the parties that took the doctrine as a licence. The manual's hedges were real. They were also, as a guide to what its readers would actually do, useless — which is a fair description of a great deal of what is in this book.
A reader told that all of this is worthless will not be able to explain why intelligent people used it for twenty years. It repays honesty.
The first four hundred pages are not a catechism. Where Stalin's "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" reduced a tradition to a list of numbered features for memorisation, the philosophical chapters here argue: on causality and determinism in modern science, on the relation of absolute and relative truth, on the difference between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. They are orthodox and they are frequently tendentious about their opponents, but they are recognisably philosophy, written by people who had read the books they attack. The political economy is better still. The chapters on state-monopoly capitalism, on the militarisation of the economy, on capitalist nationalisation, are a serious attempt to describe the post-war Western economy, and the polemic against Keynes and against Right-wing social democracy engages real arguments rather than caricatures.
One thing is missing from those four hundred pages, and the absence is shared with every Soviet philosophy manual this series has examined since. There is no history of Soviet philosophy in them at all. No Deborin, no Mitin, no Zhdanov, no Lysenko, no genetics; no account of the campaigns by which Soviet philosophers were disciplined and some of them destroyed. The Sheptulin, Afanasyev and Krapivin volumes later in this series manage that silence by periodising the 1930s and 1940s away as a kind of agentless weather. This one does not even do that: the subject is not raised. The manual that is by some distance the most candid of the family about Stalin the politician has nothing whatever to say about what was done to philosophy in his name.
More surprising is how much of the book is devoted to criticising Stalin as a theorist, in detail, on the record. His thesis that class struggle necessarily sharpens as socialism advances is rejected. Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. is repudiated twice — on commodity-money relations under socialism and on the absorption of collective-farm property — and named each time. His strategic doctrine of the main blow against the social-democratic parties, and his 1928 declaration that the Left Social-Democrats were "the most dangerous carriers of bourgeois policy in the working class", are described as having forced the Communist International into a false position. Whatever else this is, it is not evasion; it is a Moscow textbook telling Communist Parties that the line they were made to follow into the 1930s was wrong. The chapters on unity of action with socialist workers, which follow from it, are the most humane pages in the volume.
And there is the sentence the book inherits from its predecessor, printed in the introductory remarks without any sign that anyone noticed: "the Marxist-Leninist theory is not a dogma, it is a guide to action." It appeared in the conclusion of the Short Course too. Twenty-five years and one repudiated tyrant later, it is still doing the same work.
The anti-Stalinist left answered this doctrine as it was being drafted, and the answers are locatable. The fullest are in Fourth International, the English-language journal of the International Secretariat, where Ernest Mandel wrote as Ernest Germain. He took the measure of the two congresses preceding this revision in "The USSR from the XXth to the XXIst Congress of the CPSU" (no. 5), and then took apart the 1961 Programme — the document this second edition was rewritten to accommodate — in "The New Programme of the CPSU" (no. 14), which carries in the same issue the International Secretariat's resolution "The Repercussions of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU" and its open letter to that congress. He returned to it in "The World Crisis of Stalinism after 22nd Congress" (no. 15). The method of his earlier "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (nos. 10 and 11) is the one to imitate: he refuted the official history out of the official archive. On the 1960 Moscow Meeting whose conclusions this preface cites as authority, see Livio Maitan, "A Revolutionary Criticism of the Theses of the Moscow Conference" (no. 13); on the quarrel the book fights through Albania, Maitan again in "Problems and Prospects of Our Time in the Mirror of the Sino-Soviet Polemics" (no. 11) and "Once More on the Positions of the Chinese CP and Some Conjunctural Problems" (no. 18). The surviving run of this journal carries no dependable issue dates, so it is cited here by issue number alone.
The sharpest answer to the specific architecture of this book — Stalin as a defect of character, Molotov and Kaganovich as the named criminals, the institution left unexamined — was published in New York while the Russian manuscript was being closed. Murry Weiss, "Stalinism and the Twenty-Second Congress", in the American Socialist Workers Party's International Socialist Review, vol. 23 no. 1 (whole no. 158), Winter 1962, sets Khrushchev's denunciation of the anti-Party group beside Khrushchev's own record in the Ukraine: Tukhachevsky was "a traitor that the party had unmasked and liquidated, throwing him like dust to the winds so that no trace should be left", and at the congress "a distinguished military leader". Weiss then asks why Molotov was not allowed to reply, and answers with the argument this manual is built to prevent. If both records were read out, what would stand exposed is "not one pack of scoundrels or another pack but a sociological phenomenon: a bureaucracy" — "not bureaucratic errors or bureaucratic crimes but a social and historical development of a parasitic bureaucratic caste." Set that against the manual's assurance that bureaucracy is not an inherent feature of a workers' state, and the two texts are arguing directly, in the same season, about the same congress.
And there is a small item in Fourth International no. 14 that says as much as any of them: "Trotsky's Rehabilitation Requested by 62 Ceylon M.P.s". What the journal printed is the text of their letter, dated 23 November 1961, asking the Soviet government to revise a verdict passed in absence in March 1938 on the man it describes as Lenin's co-leader in October and a principal builder of the Red Army. Sixty-two members of a parliament in the Indian Ocean thought the moment had arrived. Two years later this manual would not print his name. He was rehabilitated in 2001.