The catalogue records this book as a Progress Publishers title of 1968. The book itself disagrees. Its title page reads:
V. I. LENIN / MARX — ENGELS — MARXISM / Third English Edition / Revised and Enlarged / FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE / MOSCOW 1947
In 175,000 words the phrase "Progress Publishers" does not occur once. The word Progress appears three times in the body, and every one of them is the Progressive Party of the United States or the Progressives who preached trade unionism to it. This is a Foreign Languages Publishing House book of 1947, and everything in it — the footnotes, the omissions, the one page that matters most — belongs to that year and not to 1968. FLPH Moscow became Progress in 1963, and the imprint history has evidently overwritten the record. The date is confirmed twice over from inside: the volume's own footnotes cite Engels's Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx's Selected Works in the Moscow English editions of 1946, and Stalin's Problems of Leninism in the English edition of 1945. Nothing in the book is dated later than 1946. A bibliography can be padded but it cannot be un-updated, and this one closes a year before the imprint.
That matters because 1947 is not a neutral year. This is the second year of the Zhdanovshchina, the cultural crackdown that followed the war: the decrees against Zvezda and Leningrad, the campaign against kowtowing to the West, the beginning of the drive that would end in the destruction of Soviet genetics two years later. It is also the year of the Truman Doctrine and the founding of the Cominform. A Moscow house issuing Lenin in English in 1947 was not addressing a general reading public. It was arming the foreign parties, and it was doing so at the moment when the doctrinal line was being tightened hardest at home.
The compiler names itself. The foreword is signed by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and it is unusually candid about method: the volume "follows the sixth Russian edition", whose contents are "reproduced from the third and fourth Russian editions of the Collected Works or the fourth Russian edition of the Two-Volume Edition of Selected Works", and — the sentence to keep — "The footnotes are Lenin's unless otherwise stated."
Take first the thing this volume settles, because it settles it against a line of argument this series itself has used.
It has been tempting, reading the Moscow output, to treat the sheer density of the word opportunism as a symptom: a term used so often that it must have stopped meaning anything, ritual incantation standing in for analysis. That inference is dead, and this book is what kills it. Counting the stem opportunis- and repairing the line-break hyphenation the scan introduces, Lenin uses it 117 times in 175,472 words — 6.7 per 10,000. The pooled rate across the 195 Moscow volumes in this project's corpus is 1.5. Lenin, published by his own Institute, uses the word at four and a half times the rate of the average Soviet textbook. Kautsky occurs 128 times, 7.3 per 10,000, in a book nominally about Marx and Engels.
The comparison holds in the other direction too. The Fourth International's own Tenth World Congress documents, printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 12 no. 46 of 23 December 1974, run to 129,943 words and use the same stem 22 times — 1.69 per 10,000, statistically indistinguishable from the Moscow average. Our tradition and theirs use the word at the same rate. Lenin uses it at four times both. If frequency measured ritual, Lenin would be the most ritualistic writer in the catalogue and the Fourth International would be indistinguishable from Progress Publishers. Neither is true. The argument from frequency should be retired, and this volume is the reason.
What is left when frequency goes is something harder and more useful: what the word is attached to. Lenin's usage is fastened to named men and dated acts. In the excerpt from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky he writes: "Not without reason did Rosa Luxemburg declare, on August 4, 1914, that German Social-Democracy was now a stinking corpse." That is a date, a person, and a vote — the Reichstag's approval of war credits — and it is refutable by producing a division list. Two pages earlier: "the sage Kautsky, donning his nightcap, repeats the fairy tale about 'pure democracy,' which has been told a thousand times by liberal professors." Contemptuous, certainly; but the charge is that Kautsky wrote a specific sentence about a specific question, and the sentence is quoted. Roughly a quarter of the book's uses of the stem sit within 250 characters of a date. That is not a devastating number on its own, and I would not rest much on it. What matters is that in Lenin the accusation is nearly always cashed out into a described act. Set that beside the entry for Trotskyism in Moscow's own A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (1984): "Trotskyism is a petty-bourgeois opportunist current in ideology and politics which is hostile to Marxism-Leninism and shrouds its opportunism with radical leftist phraseology." No act, no date, no person, nothing that could be shown not to have happened. Lenin wrote the vocabulary. The Institute kept the vocabulary and dropped the practice.
Which brings us to what the Institute actually did to him here, and it is a more interesting operation than a reader expecting crude censorship will predict.
The volume gathers about forty items, of which eighteen carry the marker "(Excerpt)". So the question is not only which Lenin was selected but which parts of him, and because every item has a canonical text in the Collected Works, the answer is checkable. Set the contents page against the originals and a pattern appears immediately.
The Development of Capitalism in Russia is an entire volume of the Collected Works — some 590 pages, eight chapters, built on years of zemstvo (elected local-council) statistics on peasant differentiation, manufacture and the growth of machine industry. The anthology prints an excerpt from its Preface to the Second Edition: about 1,700 words. It heads that excerpt with the book's own subtitle, "The Process of Formation of the Home Market for Large-Scale Industry" — a heading which will read to almost any reader as a promise that what follows summarises the argument. It does not. It is Lenin in 1907, looking back and saying the 1905 revolution had confirmed his analysis of Russia's class structure. The empirical work that earned him the right to say so is not here.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, six chapters and some forty sections, is reduced to one section: chapter VI §4, "Parties in Philosophy and Philosophical Blockheads". Of everything in that book, the anthology prints the section that yields a doctrine rather than an argument. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination has ten chapters; nine of them deal with Russia, Norway, the 1896 London Congress and the actual right of secession. The anthology prints chapter VIII, the one chapter about Marx. "Left-Wing" Communism has ten chapters and five appendices; the anthology prints chapter 2, on the conditions of Bolshevik success — and not chapter 8, "No Compromises?", nor chapter 9 on Britain and the Labour Party. Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution has thirteen numbered sections making the case for the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry; the anthology prints none of them, only part III of the postscript. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky has eight sections; the anthology prints the first, and nothing on soviet democracy or the Constituent Assembly.
A single cut is editorial economy. Six of them, all removing the concrete and retaining the doctrinal, is a method. The consistent casualty is Lenin the investigator — the man who counted horses per peasant household, who argued about Norway, who wrote a chapter called "No Compromises?" in order to answer yes. What survives is Lenin the source of formulations.
To this the volume adds one item that is not marked as an excerpt at all. "A Classical Judgment of the Opportunism of the Intellectuals in Social-Democracy" is listed in the contents as though it were a work. It is not: it is a single internal subheading of the preceding item, Lenin's 1907 preface to the Russian translation of the Sorge correspondence, in which he works through Engels's letters of the 1890s on the academic and opportunist elements in the German party. The section has been promoted to the status of a title. So the count of eighteen excerpts understates the fragmentation.
Against all this the volume deserves credit on one point, and the point is worth making carefully because it is where the Institute is most honest. The publisher's note states that the extracts from What Is To Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back "are reproduced here as abbreviated by the author in the 1908 publication of the books in question". That is true, and verifiable. Lenin abridged both himself for the collection Twelve Years, printed in November 1907 with 1908 on its cover, and he explained why: of What Is To Be Done? he wrote that he was reprinting it "slightly abridged, omitting only the details of organisational relations and minor polemical remarks"; of One Step Forward that he had "cut this pamphlet down by half", since minor details of the organisational struggle, and particularly the personal composition of the Party centres, "cannot possibly be of any interest to the present-day reader". A publisher's note that could have concealed a cut instead sources it to the author. Elsewhere a footnote openly records that Lenin's Bibliography of Marxism, appended to the original article, "is omitted in this edition. — Ed."
But notice the scale. Lenin's own 1907 abridgement of What Is To Be Done? removed one section from a five-chapter book. The 1947 volume prints four lettered subsections out of that book and drops the rest, including everything in chapters III to V. The publisher's note borrows Lenin's authority for a far heavier intervention than the one it describes.
Now the page that gives the volume away, and it is a single page.
The Institute's editorial hand is, across 175,000 words, remarkably light. There are 149 notes signed "— Ed." and the overwhelming majority are unobjectionable: a source for a quotation from Engels, an explanation of what Osvobozhdeniye was, a gloss on the Octobrists or the otrabotki system. Nothing has been rewritten. Trotsky is mentioned three times in the entire book, and two of the three are Lenin's own gibes — the Kautskyans "headed by Axelrod and Spectator, including even Martov, and to a large degree Trotsky", and the parenthesis "(be it said for the benefit of Trotsky the Kautskyan!)". The third is the Institute's, a twenty-four-word note identifying the August Bloc as a "Bloc of anti-Bolshevik groups and trends organized by L. Trotsky in August 1912 which fought against Lenin. — Ed." — an essence with no act attached, but a small thing. There is no Trotskyism entry in the subject index, which lists Bernsteinism, Kautskyism, Menshevism, Millerandism, Narodism, Opportunism, Proudhonism, Reformism and Revisionism. In a volume of writings mostly predating 1917, that absence is chronology rather than suppression, and it should not be reported as a finding.
The restraint is precisely what makes the exception legible.
The anthology's excerpt from The State and Revolution consists of chapter II §3 and the whole of chapter V, "The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State". Lenin's argument reaches its conclusion in a sentence about the armed workers' state which is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word": "the more rapidly does every form of the state begin to wither away."
At the end of that sentence there is a footnote number. The footnote runs to 1,429 words — longer than five of the Lenin items the volume prints — and it opens:
Continuing and developing the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state in the new historical situation, Comrade Stalin formulated the theory of the Socialist state and its tasks under the conditions of victorious Socialism and the building of Communism.
What follows is Stalin's report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(B) of March 1939, quoted at length from Problems of Leninism, Moscow 1945, pp. 635–38. It explains that Lenin had intended a second volume of The State and Revolution and died before writing it; that "what Lenin did not manage to do should be done by his disciples"; and it closes:
"But development cannot stop there. We are going ahead, towards Communism. Will our state remain in the period of Communism also? "Yes, it will, unless the capitalist encirclement is liquidated, and unless the danger of foreign military attack has disappeared."
So: at the exact point in the Lenin canon where Lenin says the state begins to wither away, the 1947 Institute attaches a footnote in which Stalin says it will not. The doctrine is not smuggled in. It is set out at length, sourced, and signed — under the cover of the foreword's flat sentence that "The footnotes are Lenin's unless otherwise stated." That sentence is the licence. Read it again after reading the footnote and it changes character entirely.
This is also the sharpest available test of the volume, and it is not a test about vocabulary. Error is admissible in these books; the category is not. The Institute is willing to say that Lenin left a book unfinished, that his theory required continuation, that his disciples had work to do. What is unthinkable is that the classification could turn inward — that the man revising Lenin on the state might himself be the object of the charge Lenin spent 117 sentences making. Opportunism, in this volume's own subject index, is filed as "Opportunism in the Labour Movement", with a cross-reference to Bernsteinism, Kautskyism, Millerandism, Reformism and Revisionism. It is a property of the movement outside. It has no address inside.
None of which makes the book worthless, and a reader told everything here is falsified learns nothing.
The selection contains genuinely first-rate things, printed complete. The 1914 Granat encyclopaedia article "Karl Marx" runs to 13,000 words and remains one of the best short expositions of Marx written by anybody. "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism" and "The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx" are here entire. So is "On Dialectics", the fragment from the philosophical notebooks. So is the 1907 preface to the Sorge letters, an obscure and valuable piece which most readers would otherwise never meet. "A Great Beginning" and "The Tasks of the Youth Leagues" are printed at full length. The apparatus is real scholarship: a descriptive list of every Russian newspaper and periodical Lenin refers to, a subject index of substance, and an index of works by Marx and Engels quoted by Lenin — a genuine research tool, and one that would embarrass a publisher who did not expect the citations to be checked. Where the volume prints Lenin, it prints him honestly; there is no evidence anywhere in these 175,000 words of a sentence altered or a passage doctored. The falsification here is entirely a matter of what is chosen, what is cut, and what is placed beside it.
The reply existed, and it was in print before the book was.
On the specific question the Stalin footnote settles by decree, Trotsky had answered eleven years earlier in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), chapter 3, "Socialism and the State" — and answered it, notably, by quoting the same passage of Lenin the anthology prints. Lenin, he notes, insisted that "the proletariat needs only a dying state — that is, a state constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away and cannot help dying away." (Trotsky's translator writes dying away where the Moscow edition writes wither away; the Russian is the same.) Trotsky's comment is the answer to the 1947 footnote before the footnote was written: this criticism "was directed at the time against reformist socialists of the type of the Russian mensheviks, British Fabians, etc. It now attacks with redoubled force the Soviet idolators with their cult of a bureaucratic state which has not the slightest intention of 'dying away.'" A doctrine that made the survival of the state conditional on capitalist encirclement was, on this reading, not a development of Lenin but a rationalisation of an apparatus that had no intention of dissolving itself.
On the wider practice — the Moscow institutes rebuilding Marx's own texts to fit current policy — there is a reply almost exactly contemporaneous with this volume. Raya Dunayevskaya, writing as Freddie Forrest, published "Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew" in Fourth International vol. 9 no. 7 (whole no. 89), September 1948, pp. 204–209. Her subject is not this anthology but Leontiev's 1943 article on the teaching of political economy, which had instructed Soviet teachers to stop building their courses "as a simple copy of the structure of Capital". Her point generalises exactly: the structure of the work was being rearranged so that the doctrine could come out differently, and the rearrangement was presented as pedagogy. What she describes being done to Capital in 1943 is what this volume does to The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1947 — not a word changed, and the argument gone.
For the longer view of the operation, Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) remains the fullest account of how the record was reworked, and it is worth reading alongside this book precisely because it shows the same restraint in reverse: the falsifications it documents are rarely inventions, and almost always selections.
Read this volume, then, as two books bound together. One is a serviceable and in places excellent Lenin reader, compiled by people who knew the material well enough to build an index of every Marx and Engels citation in it. The other is a single footnote, 1,429 words long, in which the state that had by 1947 built the camps, deported the nations and was three years past the war explains, in the voice of its General Secretary and over the signature of Lenin's own Institute, why it would not be withering away. The first book is why this edition is worth reprinting. The second is why it needs an introduction.