The date on the title page is the first thing to notice about this book, and the last thing its authors would have wanted noticed. Soviet Socialist Democracy — a collective work by three Soviet authors, edited by M. Saifulin and issued in English by Progress Publishers, Moscow — appeared in 1968. That was the year in which the phrase "socialism with a human face" entered the world's political vocabulary from Prague, and the year in which, on the night of 20–21 August, half a million Warsaw Pact troops crossed the Czechoslovak frontier to end the experiment that had produced it. A book about socialist democracy could hardly have been published at a more exposed moment.
Internal evidence dates the composition precisely enough. The Preface opens on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in November 1967. The most recent Party gathering discussed is the Twenty-Third Congress of 1966; the most recent statistical series run to 1966; the current five-year plan is "1966–70", and every reference to 1970 in the text is a forward projection, not a report. The book notes that "The transition to a five-day working week with two holidays was completed by the 50th anniversary of the Revolution." Nothing in it postdates the winter of 1967–68. Readers who encounter the figure 1970 in these pages should understand it as a target under the plan then running, not as evidence of a later printing.
So the manuscript was closed before the tanks moved, and probably before Alexander Dubček's Action Programme of April 1968. That is a defence of the authors' chronology and of nothing else. Because the book's silences do not begin in August 1968. Czechoslovakia, Dubček, Prague, the Warsaw Pact: the words do not occur in this text at all. Neither, in a volume of roughly 77,000 words on the democratic character of the Soviet state, does the name of Stalin. Not once — "Stalingrad" appears as a place name in a passage on Komsomol construction projects, and that is the whole of it. There is no reference to the Terror, to the Twentieth Congress, to the cult of personality, to rehabilitation, or to any violation of legality whatever. The book is founded, legally and rhetorically, on the Constitution of 1936 — "The victory of socialism was legislatively recorded in the 1936 Soviet Constitution," it says, and it cites that document's articles throughout — without ever remarking that the constitution was drafted and promulgated in the years of the show trials and the mass shootings. This is not evasion under pressure of events. It is the settled house style of Brezhnev-era legitimation: the Khrushchev thaw's admissions had been quietly withdrawn from export literature, and what remained was an untroubled surface.
Progress titles were commissioned, and the commission here is legible. This is an export volume, written for Western readers — sympathisers, fellow-travellers, communist party members abroad — who were being asked to defend a system they had not seen. The rhetorical construction gives it away. Twice the text stops to stage a hostile question and answer it. "Then why is only one candidate registered in each constituency and does not this violate the freedom of election?" And later: "'But how can there be democracy when there is only one party?' the reader may ask." No Soviet citizen needed those questions put to them. They are the questions a Party organiser in Turin or Camden Town had to field on a doorstep, and the book supplies the answers.
That makes it a valuable document. It is the official answer, set out at length and without the compression of a pamphlet, to the strongest objection the Soviet system faced. It should be read as such — and then measured against the standard the authors themselves invoke, which is Lenin's.
Chapter II carries the title "The National State System as a Form of Resolving the National Question in the U.S.S.R." Its exposition of Bolshevik nationalities doctrine is accurate as doctrine: it correctly reports the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia of November 1917, correctly states that self-determination extends "up to and including secession", and correctly reproduces Article 17 of the 1936 Constitution guaranteeing "The right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R." It also asserts, quoting Article 18, that "the territory of a Union Republic may not be altered without its consent."
Then it lists the twenty Autonomous Republics. The list within the Russian Federation includes the "Kabardinian-Balkar, Kalmyk, Karelian, Komi, Mari, Mordovian, North Ossetian, Tatar, Tuva, Udmurt, Checheno-Ingush, Chuvash and Yakut Autonomous Republics".
Read that list against what it does not say. The Kalmyk, Kabardino-Balkar and Checheno-Ingush autonomies appear there because they were restored in 1957. They needed restoring because in 1943 and 1944 the peoples who gave them their names — the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Chechens and the Ingush, along with the Karachai — had been loaded onto trains and deported wholesale to Central Asia and Siberia on a collective charge of wartime collaboration, with mortality in transit and in exile that historians still debate but which no serious estimate puts below the tens of thousands. The autonomies were abolished; the names were removed from maps. The book restores them to its list and says nothing about how they came to be missing. It performs the amnesia in the very sentence where the evidence sits.
Two entries are absent altogether, and their absence is the finding. There is no Volga German Autonomous Republic — abolished by decree in August 1941, its population deported, never restored. And there is no Crimean Autonomous Republic. The Crimean Tatars were deported en masse in May 1944; their republic was abolished in 1945; Crimea was transferred from the Russian Federation to Ukraine in 1954, which is a fair test of how much Article 18 was worth. The "Tatar Autonomous Republic" that does appear in the list is Tataria on the Volga, a different territory and a different people. A reader who did not already know would take the list as complete.
What makes this more than a historian's complaint is the timing. On 5 September 1967 — two months before the anniversary on which this book's Preface opens — the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree removing the collective charge of treason from the Crimean Tatars. It did not give them back their republic and it did not give them the right to go home. And they were petitioning, publicly and in numbers, at exactly the moment these chapters were being written. The Trotskyist weekly Intercontinental Press carried a report from its Paris office in its issue of 7 October 1968 ("Mass Demonstrations Staged in USSR by Crimean Tartars", vol. 6, no. 33, pp. 845–846) describing how the rehabilitation had been notified to the Tatars but "kept their decision secret from everyone else", while a secret directive went to the Crimean authorities to block returns "by administrative means — refusing residence permits, etc." The same report describes demonstrations organised on 21 April 1968 — Lenin's birthday — in towns across Uzbekistan, honouring "the signer of the decree constituting the Tartar Autonomous Republic", and their dispersal with clubs, rifle butts and water hoses; and then the arrival in Moscow, in mid-May, of several hundred Crimean Tatars at the complaint bureaus of the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet. Later that year the same paper reported the funeral of the writer Alexei Kosterin, "an impassioned defender of the rights of national minorities, particularly the Crimean Tartars", at which Major-General Pyotr Grigorenko spoke (issue of 25 November 1968).
The anti-Stalinist left had been naming this for a generation. Writing in Fourth International in 1952, George Clarke observed of the Kremlin's record on the national question that "Volga Germans, peoples of the Baltic and the Caucasus have been bodily uprooted from their homes and lands" (vol. XIII, no. 6, November–December 1952). Chapter II of the present volume was published sixteen years after that sentence, while the people it concerns were petitioning in the streets, and it does not contain the word "deportation".
Chapter III is where the book is most useful, because it is most specific — and specificity is what undoes it.
The account of electoral procedure is genuinely detailed and, so far as procedure goes, not false: universal suffrage at eighteen, secret ballot, booths, an unmarked ballot paper, polling stations on ships at sea and in maternity homes, a fifty per cent turnout threshold. Then the book asks its own hard question, and the answer is worth quoting in full because no critic could improve on it:
the Soviet electoral law does not in the least prohibit the registration of several candidates in each constituency. Moreover, electoral rolls and ballot-papers are designed for the running of several candidates. In practice, however, the electorate do not use this right and it has become the established custom to register only one candidate in each constituency.
An "established custom", spontaneously adopted by two hundred million people, of never once using a right the law expressly grants them. The reason given is that "in the U.S.S.R. there neither are nor can be any contending social forces or groups fighting for dominant positions in representative bodies during elections". Note the construction: not that there are none, but that there can be none. The book has moved from describing a state of affairs to declaring it metaphysically necessary — and in doing so has explained why a secret ballot is a formality where there is nothing to conceal. It then reports that "The almost 100 per cent attendance at the polls convincingly proves that the election campaigns are genuinely popular." No contested election is described anywhere in this volume. There was none to describe.
The same move governs the one-party section. The historical narrative there is partly true and decisively incomplete. It is true that the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries entered and then left the Soviet government of their own decision, and that Mensheviks and SRs were represented in soviets for some years. But the book's summary — "By 1922 there were almost no Socialist-Revolutionaries or Mensheviks in the Soviets, because they were simply not elected" — passes over what actually happened. Menshevik gains in soviet elections in 1920 and 1921 were annulled and their deputies arrested; the Kronstadt rising, which demanded free soviet elections, was suppressed in March 1921; the same Tenth Congress that followed it banned factions within the Bolshevik party itself; and the SR leadership was put on trial in Moscow in 1922. The one-party state was not an outcome that the electorate arrived at. It was constructed, under the pressure of a civil war that had all but destroyed the working class that made the revolution, by men who mostly understood it as an emergency and few of whom survived the 1930s to say so.
On the party's role today the book is franker than it means to be, and then not frank at all. It states plainly that "the leading and guiding role of the Party, the only party in the country, is constitutionally consolidated." Then: "Party leadership is based solely on persuasion, ideological influence and moral authority." Then the image: "Party leadership may be compared with the art of an experienced conductor who draws the best from his orchestra but naturally lets every musician play for himself." Every reader in Moscow knew that appointment to any post of consequence — in a ministry, a factory, a soviet executive committee, a trade union, a newspaper — ran through a party personnel list. The word nomenklatura (the Party's roster of privileged appointments) does not appear in this book, and could not.
A reader told that everything here is worthless learns nothing, and it would not be true. Three things in this volume deserve to be taken seriously.
First, the provision described was real. Full employment, free medical care, free education with maintenance grants, pensions, the shortest legal working week then existing in an industrial country, rents that were a token charge, a housing programme of extraordinary scale — "In 1966 alone, close to 80 million square metres of housing space were built, over 11 million people were rehoused." The trade unions did administer social insurance funds and did have a real veto over dismissals; the book cites Article 10 of the Regulations on the Rights of Factory and Office Trade Union Committees, under which a worker could not be discharged on the management's initiative without the factory committee's consent. That was a protection most workers in the capitalist world did not have. The book is even willing to concede a shortfall: "A housing shortage still exists despite the fact that annually millions of people receive apartments in new houses." What the chapter on trade unions never mentions is the right to strike. The word "strike" occurs once in the entire book — describing the soviets of 1905.
Second, the underlying critique of purely formal democracy is a serious argument with a long Marxist pedigree, and it is not answered by indignation. When the book observes that formal electoral rights in capitalist states coexist with property qualifications, gerrymanders and the private ownership of the press, it is saying something true, and something the socialist movement said long before there was a Soviet Union. That the argument was being used as cover does not make it a bad argument. It makes it a stolen one.
Third, the book preserves, almost accidentally, the standard by which it should be judged. Chapter III sets out the right of recall under Article 142 — "every deputy may be recalled at any time upon the decision of a majority of his electors" — and reports that "in 1965 alone the electors recalled more than 350 deputies of local Soviets." It then quotes Lenin to the effect that an elective body is democratic only if it recognises and exercises that right. The Conclusion returns twice to volume 25 of Lenin's Collected Works — the volume containing The State and Revolution — and closes on the sentence: "Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord."
That is the measure. The State and Revolution, written in hiding in the summer of 1917 and published in English by this same house, proposed a state on the Commune model: all officials elected and recallable, none paid more than a worker's wage, the standing army replaced by the armed people, administration simple enough for any cook to learn. Set the book's own five-year plans against that. Here the recall is real in law and hollow in practice — moved by "working people's organisations", decided "by a show of hands" at a public meeting, which is precisely the opposite of the secret ballot the book defends a few sections earlier. Here the soviets meet a few days a year and their executive committees, staffed by permanent officials, do the governing. Here the rights of Articles 125 and 126 are guaranteed, as the book itself sets out, "only 'in conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system'" — and the book calls this qualification "a vital Marxist-Leninist principle", when it is the standard formula by which a right is placed at the disposal of whoever gets to say what the interests of the working people are.
The revolutionary socialist objection to this volume is not that soviet democracy was a bad idea. It is that the soviets had been emptied of power by 1921, that the bureaucracy which filled the vacuum consolidated itself in the following decade over the corpses of most of the generation that made October, and that what is described in these pages with such procedural care is the shell. Trotsky made that argument in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936, in the same months the constitution this book relies on was being drafted.
Within weeks of these pages being printed, the argument was settled in public. Soviet troops occupied a fellow socialist state whose sovereignty the Preface of this book had implicitly guaranteed when it described the world socialist system as "a social, economic and political community of free, sovereign peoples". In September 1968 Pravda published the doctrine of limited sovereignty that justified it. Under a dateline of 27 August, Joseph Hansen called the intervention what it was in Intercontinental Press — "A Political Disaster for the Kremlin" (vol. 6, no. 28, 2 September 1968). And on 25 August, in Red Square, seven Soviet citizens unfurled a banner against the invasion and were arrested within minutes. They were doing what Chapter IV of this book says Article 125 permits: holding a demonstration.
Read it for what it is: the most complete official statement available in English of how the Soviet state described its own democracy at the moment that description became untenable.