In January 1983 the British section of the Fourth International published, in its theoretical journal The International, a long study by John Ross called “Marx on England”. It was a serious piece of work, written into a live argument: the debate opened in the 1960s by Perry Anderson’s Origins of the Present Crisis and E. P. Thompson’s The Peculiarities of the English about the shape of English history and the character of the English ruling class. Ross went back to Marx himself, and he footnoted him exhaustively. The citations run to more than fifty: On Britain, Articles on Britain, On Colonialism, On Ireland, page after page of them. Among them is one to “Palmerston and the English Oligarchy, On Britain, p426” — Marx writing in the mid-1850s about the Whig grandee who ran British foreign policy, and about the oligarchy behind him.
He never once cites the book you are holding, which is Marx’s sustained indictment of exactly that man’s tradition, written in exactly those years. There is no reason to think Ross was avoiding it. He was working, as the whole English-speaking left worked, from the Moscow anthologies, and the Moscow anthologies do not contain it.
That is the fact this edition exists to expose, and it is worth stating precisely, because the usual way of putting it is too crude. Progress Publishers did not scrub David Urquhart from the record. Articles on Britain, the 1971 Moscow collection Ross was quoting, prints Marx’s own dismissal of him in full — the Turcophile who “wants to revert to England’s common law”, who “wants to localise rather than centralise”, of whom Marx wrote that “David is a prophet facing backwards, and fascinated like an antiquarian by the vista of old England”. The volume’s index gives him a straight biographical note: “Scottish diplomat, publicist and politician, Turkophile”. The Marx who ridicules the Russophobe crank was perfectly publishable in Moscow. What was not publishable was the long, furious, documented book that Marx wrote for that crank’s newspaper.
He wrote it in English, in London, in 1856 and 1857, and it appeared in instalments in The Free Press, the paper of Urquhart’s small circle of followers, with whom Marx worked in these years without ever sharing their politics. He thought them cranks and said so; they printed what no one else would, and it paid. What he produced, gathered here under the title his daughter Eleanor gave it, is a running commentary on eighteenth-century diplomatic papers built to prove a single startling thesis: that the foreign policy of England had for a century been secretly bent to the service of Russia, and that the men who ran it were in one degree or another Russia’s instruments. Around that argument Marx wraps a history of Russia itself — the rise of Muscovy under the shadow of the Mongols, the “bloody mire” out of which the modern Russian state crawled, the transformation Peter the Great worked on it. It is Marx at his most forensic and his most one-sided at once.
Be plain about the weaknesses, because the tradition this edition comes from has no stake in pretending they are not there. The governing idea — a hidden hand, a century-long conspiracy of ministers bought or duped by Petersburg — is the weakest kind of history, the kind that explains everything and therefore nothing. Marx, who elsewhere taught the world to look past the intentions of statesmen to the interests of classes, here does nearly the opposite, reading great events out of secret motives and personal treachery, and supplying the missing certainty himself where the documents decline to prove complicity. His account of Russia is worse: an unchanging drive to expand, handed down intact from the Mongol yoke through Ivan to the tsars of his own day, is exactly the sort of national essence that Marx’s own method exists to dissolve. It is the least Marxist thing Marx wrote, and it carries the marks of the company he was keeping when he wrote it.
So why print it? Because a book can be wrong in its argument and revealing in its fate, and the fate of this one is very revealing.
The Soviet state made a career of publishing Marx entire: the juvenilia, the notebooks, the letters, the crossings-out. It built institutes to do nothing else. And it left this book out of the editions that did the work — the anthologies that went into the world’s libraries and the world’s party bookshops, the volumes a militant in Manchester or Melbourne actually had on the shelf. The reason is not obscure. A book whose whole burden is that Russia is a uniquely predatory power, and that its statecraft is the continuous expression of a despotic tradition reaching back to Genghis Khan, was not a book a Russian great power dressed in red could put on open sale, least of all in the decades when that power was absorbing its neighbours and explaining, in Marx’s name, that its expansion was liberation. The censor’s instinct was sound. Marx had written the indictment, and it fitted.
What the Ross footnotes show is the second half of that operation, the half usually missed. A canon is not only a list of what is printed. It is a shape imposed on what can be thought with. Ross was not a Soviet author; he was writing for an organisation whose reason for existing was opposition to the Soviet state, in a journal that in the same issues was publishing attacks on the Kremlin’s every position. He was, on this question, still reading the Marx that Moscow had assembled. The Moscow editors had selected, and their selection set the syllabus for their enemies. That is what a monopoly on the collected works buys, and it is why this series keeps returning to the apparently dry question of what went into which volume.
There is one witness who did look, and what became of him belongs to the same story. In the November–December 1951 issue of The New International — the journal of the Independent Socialist League, Max Shachtman’s group, which had broken from the Fourth International’s American section eleven years before — seven pages of these articles appeared under Marx’s own title, Revelations on Russia (pp. 360–366), all but one section in the original English of The Free Press of February and April 1857, the one exception translated back out of French. The prefatory note is by Maximilien Rubel, and it is four sentences long, and it contains the whole argument of this introduction. The text, Rubel wrote, had been “suppressed by the editors of the works of Marx and Engels in the Russian language”, although Potemkin’s official History of Diplomacy, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, had cited it on several occasions: “Phrases torn out of their context are placed within a chain of ideas which have not the slightest bearing upon the thought of Marx.” And he named the reason. Soviet historiography now presented Stalin’s regime as “the logical consequence of Russia’s entire historic evolution”, the completion of a labour of state-building begun by Ivan III and Peter the Great; and therefore “all the Slavophile theses of former Russian historians have again been taken up by the official Soviet historians”. The excerpts were translated and edited by Henry Judd, who reviewed Rubel’s Marx anthology in the pages immediately following, and who mentioned the “suppression by the Russian government” of Marx’s writings in passing, as a thing that needed no arguing.
Then it sank. The note ran in a small American magazine, in a year when the tendency that printed it was absorbed in almost nothing but the Russian question; what it carried were extracts and not the book; and thirty-two years later a serious Marxist in the same tradition, working through more than fifty Moscow citations, did not know the book was there. That is the exact version of the claim this edition makes, and it is worth having exactly. It is not that nobody noticed the hole. Somebody noticed it, printed the evidence, and drew the right conclusion, and it changed nothing, because a note in a journal cannot compete with a shelf.
There is a temptation to be resisted here, and the anti-Stalinist reader is the one most likely to feel it. The temptation is to seize on this book as proof — to say that Marx himself saw, a century early, what the Soviet state would become, and that the Secret Diplomatic History is the founder’s own verdict on the regime that suppressed it. That would mean adopting Marx’s error in order to score the point. The bureaucratic state that arose in Russia after 1928 was not the return of an eternal Muscovy; it was a new formation thrown up by a real revolution isolated and starved into deformation, and to explain it by the ghost of the Mongols is to abandon materialism for the mysticism this book indulges. Trotsky, who understood that state better than anyone, never reached for a civilisational Russia to account for it. He reached for backwardness, isolation, scarcity, and a caste that raised itself above an exhausted working class.
The sharper reading is narrower. The state suppressed the book not because the book had secretly diagnosed it, but because the book’s crude nationalism of eternal Russia was uncomfortably close to the crude nationalism the state was itself manufacturing — Great-Russian pride in a Marxist wrapper — and no regime can afford to hear its own myths said out loud by its own prophet in the wrong key. What the suppression exposes is not Marx’s foresight but the editors’ method: they trimmed their founder wherever he failed to flatter them, and this book failed spectacularly.
Read it, then, for two things at once. Read it as a period piece and a warning against a way of thinking — the conspiratorial history, the nation with a fixed character, the argument that proves too much — and notice that the author of the warning is Marx, which is the most useful lesson available, since it means no name on a title page exempts a text from criticism. And read it as an exhibit in the making of canons. This series exists to show what the Soviet state did with the men it embalmed: what it printed, what it cut, what it corrected, and here, what it quietly declined to print. The Secret Diplomatic History is the clearest case of the last kind. Not a text falsified, but a text disappeared, so thoroughly that the one man who printed the evidence could print only extracts, and a hostile scholar writing a hundred and twenty-six years later, with every Moscow volume on his desk, did not know to look for it.
The text is Marx’s own English, reproduced from the edition his daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling prepared and Swan Sonnenschein published in 1899, after her death; the publishers’ brief preface, kept here at the front, records that she did not live long enough to see these papers through the press. Nothing has been modernised or corrected, and the reproduced documents keep their eighteenth-century spelling. What we have added is this introduction and nothing else.