The book opens on a boast, and the boast is worth pausing over, because everything that follows is built on it and so is everything the book cannot say. "The past decades of the 20th century," Khachik Momjan begins, "were the most revolutionary in man's history." Fifty years earlier, he writes, "the system of capitalist enterprise ruled undivided" and socialism "dwelled modestly between the covers of books"; now "socialism has triumphed in a number of European and Asian countries, and in Cuba, too," and "the world socialist system embraces more than one-third of mankind." The century is being read as a single ascending arc, from the covers of books to a third of the earth, and the reader is invited to stand at its summit and look back down the slope.
That summit has a date. The Dynamic Twentieth Century is a book of the fiftieth anniversary of October — the phrase "fifty years ago" tolls through its first pages — and Progress Publishers issued it in English, in Vic Schneierson's translation, in 1968. Hold both dates together, because the distance between them is the first thing the modern reader needs. The manuscript was written in about 1967: its latest datable material is the industrial output of 1966, a strike-statistics series running to 1966, a growth comparison for 1961–65, and an American unemployment forecast for 1970 that is plainly an extrapolation, not a memory. It is a book conceived for the jubilee, in the confident middle years of Brezhnev, when the Soviet leadership had settled the Khrushchev succession, wound down the worst of the destalinisation it could not fully reverse, and was preparing to celebrate half a century of the state. The English edition then appeared in 1968 — the year Soviet tanks entered Prague. The author could not have known that when he wrote. The publisher knew it when the book reached the West. A triumphal account of the law-governed march of history, printed in the language of international circulation, in the very months that history's leading force was crushing a reform movement inside its own camp: that coincidence is not the author's fault, but it is the frame the book now has to be read in, and it turns out to be exactly the right one.
Who was writing? Khachik Momjan was an Armenian philosopher inside the Soviet ideological establishment, a specialist in historical materialism and in the criticism of "bourgeois" philosophy of history, the kind of trained academic Progress used when it wanted a case argued rather than merely asserted. He is not an anonymous committee. Readers of this series will meet him again six years later, in a sharper mood, as the author Moscow assigned to destroy Roger Garaudy — Marxism and the Renegade Garaudy (1974), a book-length excommunication of the French Communist Party's most distinguished theorist for the crime of having condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. That later commission tells you a good deal about this earlier one. The man who in 1968 wrote the serene philosophy of the century's forward motion was, by 1974, the licensed instrument for silencing the philosopher who had looked at Prague and refused to celebrate. The two books are the same operation at two temperatures.
So The Dynamic Twentieth Century is not, despite its title, a narrative history. It is a work of philosophy of history, and its real subject is Western pessimism. Its eight chapters march through the "gloomy view" of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the "voluntaristic interpretation" of history, the theorists of convergence between capitalism and socialism ("The Conception of Appeased Opposites"), and close on "The Laws of History Are Irrevocable." Its structure is a running argument that the bourgeois thinkers who fear the future — the apocalyptics, the existentialists, the prophets of the "twenty-fifth hour" — are the frightened ideologists of a class in decline, while Marxism-Leninism alone possesses the "scientifically substantiated faith in man's unswerving advance to communism." The book's animating claim is that history is objective and law-governed, that its direction is knowable, and that the direction is communist. "Mankind's advance," Momjan concludes, "is advance to communism," and "the irreversible laws of history are the laws of man's activity."
It is worth crediting how well Momjan states his own creed, because the argument that follows depends on his stating it clearly, and he does. His century has a hinge — October 1917 — and a mechanism: the "general crisis of capitalism," within which the system breaks up "link by link" as country after country "drops away." The engine is not the will of leaders but the maturing of objective conditions. Indeed, Momjan spends a chapter dismantling the opposite view. In "The Voluntaristic Interpretation of History" he arraigns Thomas Carlyle, who "championed the cult of great personalities, the chosen, the executors of the will of the world spirit," and brands the position "a subjectivist and voluntarist approach." History, for Momjan, is precisely not the biography of great men; it is the law-governed succession of social formations, driven by the class whose hour has come. He goes further, and states the deterministic case at its boldest: "The sphere of accident in social relations is shrinking. We can see it shrink." The more the masses grasp the necessary laws of their own development, he argues, the more "accidental departures from the general line of historical development" are precluded.
Remember that sentence. A book that has staked its whole authority on the claim that accident is shrinking, that history is objective law and not the deeds of individuals, has set itself a trap it cannot see. For there is one episode in the century it is narrating that this philosophy will be structurally unable to explain — and it is not an episode in the enemy's history. It is in its own.
Test the book where this series always tests them: not on what it says about capitalism, where it is often shrewd, but on what it says, and does not say, about the state that published it. The twentieth century Momjan is celebrating is the century of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union did certain things in that century that a triumphal philosophy of law-governed progress has no place to put.
Begin with the one crime the book does name, because the way it names it is the whole tell. The Stalin terror appears here — glancingly, in a few sentences near the end — under the standard post-1956 anaesthetic, "the Stalin personality cult." "Special mention should be made," Momjan writes, "of the gross subjectivist errors made during the Stalin personality cult period. There were violations of socialist democracy and of the Leninist standards of political and Party life. The principle of collective leadership was ignored. One man made most of the decisions, often profoundly erroneous." And then the crucial move, the sentence the whole passage exists to deliver: these errors and abuses "were not rooted in the socialist system as such, and constituted a departure from its substance and the objective general line of development."
Read that against the book's own philosophy and it collapses. Momjan has spent two hundred pages insisting that the sphere of accident is shrinking, that history is objective law and not the will of individuals, that the "cult of great personalities" is a bourgeois delusion he can refute. Now, confronted with the single greatest catastrophe of Soviet history — the shooting of the better part of a generation of Bolsheviks, the destruction of the Red Army command on the eve of the war, a death toll in the hundreds of thousands from execution alone and millions more in the camps — he explains it as the subjective error of one man. "One man made most of the decisions." The philosopher who convicted Carlyle of a "subjectivist and voluntarist approach" now offers a purely voluntarist, purely subjectivist account of the Terror: it was Stalin's personal deviation, an accident that befell the system from outside its own laws, "not rooted in the socialist system as such." The great-man theory of history, banished from every other page, is smuggled back in at exactly the point where the system's own laws would otherwise stand accused. Determinism for the enemy's crises; a bad emperor for one's own.
The anti-Stalinist reply to this had been in print for thirty years, and it was written from Marxism, not against it. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), composed while the Terror was gathering, Trotsky refused the personal explanation on principle. "It would be naive," he wrote, "to imagine that Stalin, previously unknown to the masses, suddenly issued from the wings full armed with a complete strategical plan. No indeed. Before he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin himself." Stalin was not the cause but the instrument — "the indubitable leader of the Thermidorian bureaucracy," a privileged caste thrown up by the isolation and exhaustion of the revolution in a backward country. "The leaden rump of bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution," Trotsky wrote; "that is the secret of the Soviet's Thermidor." This is the genuinely materialist account, and its force is that it locates the Terror in the social structure — where Momjan's own stated method says causes must lie — rather than in one man's character. Momjan cannot follow his own philosophy to that conclusion, because the conclusion is that the crimes were systemic. So he abandons the philosophy and reaches for the emperor. And Trotsky had named the manoeuvre in advance: the attempt to explain the regime's zigzags "by changing circumstances," he wrote, "obviously won't hold water" — the theory is always "created after the fact." Momjan's cult-of-personality paragraph is precisely such a theory, created after the fact, to keep the system innocent of its own history.
Notice, too, what immediately follows the confession. Having granted that "one man" did "great damage," Momjan pivots at once to the accusers: "all these champions of democracy who howl about the Stalin cult keep totally silent about the crying lawlessness, the fascist abuse, the wholesale killings and savage racist discrimination in some of the capitalist countries." The Terror is admitted for a sentence and then drowned in Mississippi and Vietnam. The whataboutism is not incidental; it is the mechanism by which the admission is neutralised. Nothing in the passage carries a single name, a single number, or a single institution. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, the Moscow Trials, the shooting of Tukhachevsky and the officer corps — none of it is here. There is only "one man," his "errors," and the counter-charge.
If the cult is the crime the book half-names, the famine is the crime it inverts. Collectivisation gets a warm paragraph. Momjan concedes, in the abstract, that there were problems: "The haste that occurred sometimes, the wish to take short cuts and avoid necessary stages in the collectivisation of agriculture ... inflicted considerable damage." But the damage is administrative and passing, and the verdict is triumph: "socialist collectivisation overcame all these difficulties and triumphed. ... The old Russian village with its poverty, its hunger, its brutal oppression, its hopeless and benighted ignorance, is gone never to return." Watch the word hunger. Momjan permits it into the sentence — but only as a feature of the pre-collectivisation past, the bad old village that collectivisation abolished. The famine of 1932–33, in which several million people starved in Ukraine, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan as a direct result of the grain requisitioning that drove collectivisation through, does not occur. It has been not merely omitted but stood on its head: hunger is what the collective farm ended, not what it caused. This is the same erasure the sibling volume in this series, the Institute of History's A Short History of the World (Volume Two, 1974), performs on the same events — there the one appearance of the word "famine" is as a weapon the kulaks intended to use. Two Progress books, the same century, the same silence, arranged with the same care. It is a house style.
Then the outright silences, and these are the cleanest findings, because a philosopher's book of 1967 had every reason to reach for these episodes and did not. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 is absent — the year "1939" appears in this book exactly twice, once inside a run of strike statistics and once in the title of a cited book, and never as an event. The Great Terror's own year, 1937, appears twice, and both times as an economic baseline: Soviet industrial output is "approximately ten times that of 1937." The year in which the Terror reached its height survives in the book solely as a benchmark for the growth of steel. And Hungary — the word occurs, but never for 1956. Momjan reaches for "Hungary" only to invoke 1919, when "the imperialists were able to crush socialist revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria and other countries with relative ease": the good revolution, martyred from outside. The Hungary of 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks, cannot be spoken, because within the book's schema it would be the people rising against the people's own state, and the schema forbids the sentence.
Which returns us to Czechoslovakia, and to 1968. The word "Czechoslovakia" appears once in the whole book — as an item in a list, "Russia, China, Poland, Czechoslovakia and many other countries where capitalism has been overthrown." It is a trophy in a display case, the coup of 1948 counted as another link won. The author, writing in 1967, could not have named the invasion of 1968; no one is asking him to have foreseen it. The point is structural and it is about the publisher's timing as much as the author's text. Progress sent this book into English — a book whose thesis is that socialism advances by irrevocable law and whose leading force is the Soviet state — in the year that same state sent five armies across the Czechoslovak border to end "socialism with a human face." The book has no room for such an event, and that is precisely the finding: a philosophy in which the sphere of accident is forever shrinking and every socialist advance expresses an objective law simply has no category for the socialist state crushing a socialist reform. When reality produced exactly that, in the very season of publication, the machinery jammed. And the man who wrote this book was, within six years, the one Moscow chose to jam it publicly, in print, against Garaudy.
The book names Trotsky four times and quotes him never. The characterisation is a fabrication of a familiar kind. Momjan tells his reader that "Trotsky worked out the dubious plan of using the Soviet state and its armed forces to perform 'revolutionary' coups in other countries," a plan "firmly rejected by the Soviet Communist Party." This is invention. The theory of permanent revolution — which the book attacks by imputation and never once names, so that the reader cannot check the charge against the doctrine — rested on the opposite foundation: the self-activity of the working class internationally. "The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it," Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution (1930); socialist construction, hemmed in by "an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships on the world arena," could be secured only "by way of the international revolution" — that is, by the workers of other countries making their own revolutions, not by the Red Army making them for them. The doctrine's actual antagonist was "socialism in one country," Stalin's formula, which the theory of permanent revolution set itself squarely against. Momjan has taken a theory grounded in international working-class agency and rewritten it as a scheme for export by bayonet — the precise reverse of what it says — while withholding its name so that no reader can catch the substitution.
The fabrication has a 1967 purpose. Momjan immediately extends it to the present: "projects resembling those of Trotsky emanate from those Left doctrinaires in the world communist movement who oppose the idea of the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems." That is the Sino-Soviet split, and the sentence is doing double duty — arming the reader against Trotskyism and against Maoism in a single stroke, folding both into the category of "voluntarist," "subjective" adventurers who reject the peaceful, law-governed advance that the book exists to preach. Peaceful coexistence is the book's foreign-policy horizon, and its enemies to the left are tarred with the same brush as its enemies to the right: both are accused of not trusting the objective laws of history. The reader who wants the theory the book suppresses can find it in The Permanent Revolution itself; the reader who wants the century's hinge, October 1917, narrated from the other side of the split will find it in Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which tells the story of the year Momjan makes into a philosophical axiom.
None of this is a reason to throw the book away, and the case against it is stronger for saying so. Momjan is a real reader of the Western thinkers he attacks, and the first half of the book — the survey of twentieth-century pessimism, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel to the convergence theorists and the "end of history" apocalyptics of the 1950s — is a genuine, and at moments acute, piece of intellectual history. He has read his opponents in the original, quotes them at length and by the page, and is often right that their gloom is the mood of a class that has stopped believing in its own future. His account of the "appeased opposites" — the mid-century convergence theories predicting a fusion of capitalism and socialism into a managed "mixed" society — is a sharper piece of criticism than most of what the Cold-War West produced about the same theories. And the book's largest positive claims are not nothing: the twentieth century was the century in which the European colonial empires broke up and "more than 1,200 million people ... won political independence"; it was the century of two world wars issuing from the crises of capitalism; the "general crisis" it describes was, on the economic side, a real object and not only a slogan. Where Momjan is writing about capitalism's contradictions, decolonisation, and the fears of Western intellectuals, he is worth reading. It is only when the instrument is turned toward his own state that it goes dark — and it goes dark by design, not by ignorance.
That is the book, and it is a clean specimen. Read it as what it is: the fiftieth-anniversary philosophy of the Soviet century, stated by an able man at the confident noon of the Brezhnev settlement — a philosophy whose entire authority rests on the claim that history is objective law and not the deeds of individuals, and which is therefore obliged, at the one place where its own state stands accused, to explain the accusation away as the deeds of a single individual. The determinism that convicts capitalism becomes a great-man theory the moment the subject is the Terror. The century that advances by irrevocable law cannot narrate the lawlessness at its own centre; the philosopher who exposed the "cult of great personalities" in Carlyle takes refuge in it over Stalin. And the whole was printed in English in the year the tanks reached Prague, by a house that would shortly commission this same author to defend the deed. The book tells you the twentieth century was the most dynamic in human history. It could not tell you the one thing a history of that century most needed to say, and the reason it could not is written into its first premise.