Most Progress volumes hide their authors behind an institute. This one puts them on the contents page, twelve of them, one to a chapter, and the list is the most interesting document in the book. It opens with P. N. Pospelov on "Leninism and the Building of Communism in the USSR" and follows immediately with F. V. Konstantinov on "Development of Philosophical Thought in the USSR." Then A. I. Pashkov on the political economy of socialism, L. A. Leontyev on modern imperialism, N. V. Tropkin on the theory of socialist revolution, S. L. Titarenko on the party, D. I. Chesnokov on the socialist state, V. G. Afanasyev on scientific management, G. Kharakhashyan on the world socialist system, M. V. Iskrov on the international working-class movement, M. I. Kulichenko on the national question, and E. A. Arab-Ogly on the scientific and technological revolution.
The unsigned Introduction states the commission plainly: "This volume is an attempt to sum up the contribution that has been made by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union towards developing revolutionary theory on a number of major problems after Lenin's death." After Lenin's death. The period the book undertakes to cover is 1924 to 1971, and the last chapter reports that its subject "occupies a prominent place in the preparations for the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU" — which met on 30 March 1971. So the volume was assembled in the run-up to that congress and exported in its aftermath: a stocktaking of Soviet theory, in English, for the Western communist parties and their students, at the moment Brezhnev's leadership was consolidating.
Now the count. In roughly 130,000 words about the development of revolutionary theory over half a century, Lenin's name appears about six hundred times. Brezhnev's appears seventeen times. Stalin's appears four times, in three sentences, and never as the subject of a sentence: twice as "the personality cult of Stalin," once as "the Stalin personality cult," and once in the phrase "During the last years of Stalin's life." He is not a theorist here, nor an author of anything, nor even a politician. He is a weather condition.
That is a striking way to write the theoretical history of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953. It is a still more striking way for Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov to write it. Pospelov was one of the two principal drafters of the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, the most widely printed political text of the century and the volume that opens this series. He edited Pravda through the war and after — the Fourth International was quoting him in that capacity in 1949 — and he directed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism into the 1960s. He also chaired the commission that in 1955–56 assembled the material on the destruction of the Central Committee which Khrushchev used in the secret speech. There is no one alive in 1971 better placed to write the honest version of this chapter, and no one with more reason not to.
His chapter narrates Lenin's plan, industrialisation, collectivisation, the cultural revolution, and then arrives at the following sentence: "As a result of the consistent fulfilment of Lenin's plan, the building of socialism was, in the main, completed in the Soviet Union by 1937. This achievement was legislatively recorded in the new Constitution of the USSR." That is the whole of 1937 in this book, apart from two statistical citations and a note about the school year. The paragraph that follows is the closest Pospelov comes to acknowledging that there is anything else to say, and it is a complaint:
In dealing with the post-war period the Soviet press has not always clearly established the continuity with the processes that had taken place before the war. Sometimes, in connection with the criticism of the personality cult of Stalin, the colossal work accomplished by the Party and the Soviet people in building the material and technical basis of socialism, raising the standard of living and the people's cultural level, and in strengthening the country's defence capability has been indiscriminately run down.
The grievance is that the Twentieth Congress went too far. It is registered in 1971 by the man who supplied the Twentieth Congress with its evidence.
The other characteristic silence is the Short Course itself. A volume surveying the CPSU's theoretical production after Lenin's death does not mention the single most disseminated theoretical text that production ever generated — not to praise it, not to repudiate it, not at all. The back matter advertises its replacement, A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, "written by Soviet historians under the editorship of Academician Ponomaryov." Trotsky, meanwhile, receives an editorial footnote that ends: "In 1929 Trotsky was exiled." The parenthesis after his name reads "(1879–1940)." What happened in 1940 is left to the dates.
Konstantinov's philosophy chapter is the volume's second exhibit, and it repays the same treatment. Konstantinov was a genuine professional — an Academician, director of the Institute of Philosophy through the 1960s, editor-in-chief of the five-volume Soviet Philosophical Encyclopaedia — and a year after this book he served as responsible editor of A Critique of Mao Tse-tung's Theoretical Conceptions, also in this series, whose charge against Mao was that one leader's will had been substituted for material conditions and one man's thought made the measure of theory.
Here he narrates the philosophical 1920s at real length: the fight against mechanistic materialism, Lyubov Axelrod, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Bukharin's theory of equilibrium, the journal Pod znamenem marksizma, "crowded meetings at which heated debates took place" in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov and Kiev. Then the mode changes. "But towards the beginning of the 1930s (in some cases even earlier) serious errors and distortions came to light in the work of the journal and in the school of A. M. Deborin, who headed the journal." Came to light: no agent, no decree, no date. What actually happened is that in January 1931 a Central Committee resolution branded Deborin's group "Menshevising idealism" and installed Mark Mitin in charge of Soviet philosophy — an event without which nothing in the rest of the chapter is intelligible. Deborin survived. Jan Sten, who had tutored Stalin in Hegel, was shot in 1937. Mitin's name does not appear in this book.
Nor does the text that followed. Between 1938 and 1953, Soviet philosophy meant, in practice, the second section of the fourth chapter of the Short Course — "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," reprinted under Stalin's name in tens of millions of copies and treated from Prague to Peking as simply what Marxism was. A chapter titled "Development of Philosophical Thought in the USSR" does not cite it, discuss it or mention it. The whole period between the Deborin campaign and the 1960s is disposed of in three sentences: "After Lenin's death some mistakes were made in the course of socialist construction. The personality cult damaged the development of Marxist theory and philosophy. It fettered theoretical thinking, pushing it into dogmatism and reducing it to commentary." The diagnosis is exactly right. It is offered without a single example.
The one that would have cost most is handled in a parenthesis. "At one time some philosophers committed the serious error of oversimplifying the approach to special problems of natural science (the theory of relativity, genetics and cybernetics) and thereby undermined the alliance between Marxist philosophers and materialistic natural scientists. This error has been rectified." Inside that bracket is the destruction of Soviet genetics: Lysenko's triumph at the August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the sacking of the geneticists, the imprisonment and death of Nikolai Vavilov in 1943. "Some philosophers" is a considerable understatement of the responsible parties, and the passive "has been rectified" spares the reader any account of how.
And yet Konstantinov also writes this, and it should be quoted because it is unlike anything else in the volume: "Perhaps, there was a better way of achieving this, with fewer sacrifices. But we were the pioneers and had no models, no historical examples to draw on." That is a man conceding, in a book that concedes nothing, that the sacrifices were real and might not have been necessary. He does not say what they were. He does say they happened.
So much for the prosecution. Two chapters here are serious work and a reader would be badly served by a blanket verdict.
Pashkov's chapter on the political economy of socialism is genuine intellectual history, and it is the only place in the book where doctrine visibly changes its mind. He traces the long argument over whether the law of value operates under socialism: the 1920s consensus that it would wither with the market; the "Leftist prattle" of the turn of the 1930s about abolishing money; the 1941 Central Committee discussion of the draft political economy textbook, at which the denial of the law of value was ruled wrong because it "clashed with the existence in the USSR of trade, money, prices, wages, profit, rent and cost accounting"; the discussion of 1951; the textbook of 1954; and the reform launched by the March and September 1965 plenums, whose aim he states without euphemism as being "to give priority to economic methods of management over administrative methods, enhance the role of the market in the mechanism of economic management and provide greater economic incentives for factories and for individual workers." He then lists what the discipline has not solved — "the planning of prices, the purchasing power of the population, the market situation and long-term forecasting" — a candid inventory in a book otherwise composed of achievements.
Pashkov also does something no one else here does: he quotes the Stalin period against itself, by page and issue. The doctrine that economic laws under socialism are made by the state he sources to the journal Bolshevik, 1937, no. 1, p. 24 — "These laws are created and modified by the socialist state headed by the Communist Party" — and calls it the basis of "subjectivistic decisions and voluntarism in the management of the national economy under the personality cult." That is a real citation of a real error. But note where the correction comes from. The proposition that the economic laws of socialism are objective and not created by the state, together with the recognition that the law of value operates, is the central argument of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, written out of that very discussion of November 1951 and published in 1952. Pashkov credits the discussion. He does not credit the pamphlet, which is nowhere in this volume. The one doctrinal advance he can point to in twenty-five years is attributed to a meeting so that it need not be attributed to a man.
Leontyev on modern imperialism is the other chapter that holds. It is empirical, footnoted to sources the reader can check — East German Marxist economists on the West German state's share of national income, an Italian bourgeois economist on state holding companies, US federal research expenditure by year — and it is arguing about something real: whether the post-war expansion of the capitalist state's economic role changes the character of capitalism. His answer, that state-monopoly capitalism concentrates public resources in private hands without altering class relations, is defended rather than asserted, and one of his borrowed formulations has outlived him. Quoting E. Rossi's study of the Italian state sector, he describes an arrangement that gives the finance magnates "the possibility of socialising losses and privatising profits." Anyone who lived through 2008 has heard that sentence. It was in a Progress Publishers export title in 1971.
Elsewhere the volume's silences pass from the past into the present, and there they are harder to forgive. Chesnokov's chapter on the socialist state contains the sentence: "In 1938–1940, in line with the new historical conditions and the new theoretical conclusions, the Party reorganised the work of all local government, Party and public organisations on the basis of extended socialist democracy." Chesnokov, a philosopher raised to the enlarged Party Presidium by Stalin at the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952 and removed from it within months of his death, then explains that wartime centralism and the cult "did not impair the foundations of socialist democracy and had no tangible effect on the development of the initiative and activity of the people."
Kharakhashyan's chapter on the world socialist system, written three years after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, records that economic co-ordination among the socialist states "fully conforms to the national sovereignty and economic and political independence of each socialist country" and that the Warsaw Treaty Organisation "is a major factor of peace in Europe and the rest of the world." Iskrov, on the international movement, writes that revolution "is accomplished by the proletariat and other working strata of the given country. It cannot be imposed from without." August 1968 appears nowhere in these 130,000 words. The single mention of Czechoslovakia in the book concerns the wartime Resistance. Hungary is discussed only in 1919.
What the volume could not say was being said elsewhere, including by people inside the country. In the weeks before the Twenty-Fourth Congress, the historian Pyotr Yakir — son of the general Iona Yakir, shot in 1937 — circulated an open letter to the delegates warning that "a dangerous tendency toward the rebirth of Stalinist methods of government has become apparent," and insisting on his standing to say so: "I am a historian and citizen of my country, not just the illegally persecuted son of Yakir who perished under Stalin." Two months earlier, Intercontinental Press had reported the rumour, sourced to the Soviet ambassador in Prague, that the congress would formally rescind the Twentieth Congress's denunciation — the ambassador reportedly arguing that "the past fourteen years have proved the rightness of Stalin's thesis on the aggravation of the class struggle in conditions of socialism" ("Soviet CP Congress to 'Rehabilitate' Stalin?", vol. 9, no. 4, 1 February 1971). It did not happen. Allen Myers, reporting the congress itself, noted the outcome that best explains this book: "The late dictator's name was not mentioned even once during the congress." Myers also recorded that the delegates approved an exchange of party cards, "the method used in Czechoslovakia following August 1968 to eliminate members considered unreliable," and quoted Brezhnev's warning against "some people" who "sought to reduce the diversity of present-day Soviet reality to problems that have irreversibly receded into the past" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 9, no. 16, 26 April 1971). The volume in your hands is that instruction carried out in the field of theory: not rehabilitation, not reckoning, but a past that has irreversibly receded.
The anti-Stalinist left had been reading these authors for a generation by then. In April 1949, Michel Pablo devoted an article in Fourth International (vol. X, no. 4) to the Kremlin's sudden discovery that the people's democracies had been dictatorships of the proletariat all along, and quoted, as the authoritative statement of the new line, "Pospelov, editor-in-chief of Pravda, speaking at a Lenin memorial meeting held in Moscow on January 21." Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain, answered the Short Course's official successor point by point in "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," Fourth International nos. 10 and 11, and his method — refuting the official history out of the official archive — is the one to use on this book too. For the underlying analysis, Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) remains the text that explains why a bureaucracy needs a theoretical history with holes in it. And on the specific question Pashkov could not raise, Georg Lukács had already said the necessary thing in an interview reported in Intercontinental Press (vol. 8, no. 2, 19 January 1970): economic reforms cannot succeed "unless they proceed to a renewal of socialist democracy." The 1965 reform that Pashkov and Pospelov both celebrate was substantially dead within five years, for reasons the volume's own list of unsolved problems circles without naming.
Read it, then, for what it is: the last serious attempt by the Soviet academy to present itself to the world as a living theoretical tradition, made by men who knew exactly which page was missing. Pospelov wrote the Short Course in 1938. He prepared the indictment of it in 1956. In 1971 he opened a survey of Soviet revolutionary theory that mentions neither. Three documents, one hand, and the third is the only one in which nothing at all is admitted.