The spine says 1971, but this is a book written for a single day: 22 April 1970, the hundredth anniversary of Lenin's birth. Its own Foreword says so — "The Russian edition was published on the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" — and the internal evidence agrees. In 173,779 words the latest event the volume can name is the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in June 1969, which it invokes some sixty times and treats as the settled frame of everything that follows. There is no 1970 event in the book at all. The two later-looking year-tokens are a projection ("the level of scientific and technological development in 1980") and a wage agreement due to take effect by 1972. So the text is a 1969 text, the Russian edition is a centenary product of April 1970, and the English translation is a year behind it. By the time this English volume reached a bookshop it had already been overtaken by its own cast: Walter Ulbricht, whose chapter is signed "First Secretary, Central Committee, Socialist Unity Party of Germany", was removed from that post in May 1971.
The book says who asked for it, which spares us guessing. It is "a collective work by authors from different countries, who responded to the request of the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, Academy of Sciences of the USSR", and it is announced as "the first monograph in this series", a series to be published under the general heading International Working Class. The front matter names three editors of the Russian text — Y. Kuskov, A. Rumyantsev and T. Timofeyev — and nobody else. That produces an unusual object: a book with two halves that do not belong to the same genre. Part One is some 110 pages of signed political statement by four men speaking in their official capacities — M. A. Suslov for the CPSU Politburo, Waldeck Rochet for the French Communist Party, Ulbricht for the SED, Gus Hall for the CPUSA. Part Two is around 360 pages of anonymous institute monograph. The signatures are the warrant; the monograph is the book. Read them apart, because they work differently, and the second is much the more interesting of the two.
Two habits recur across the Progress foreign-policy list, and this volume is the ideal place to test them, because a book titled Leninism and the World Revolutionary Working-Class Movement has undertaken by its title to derive current doctrine from Lenin by quotation.
The first habit is that "peaceful coexistence" is never quoted from Lenin. In Tomashevsky's Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations (1974) the phrase appears in 92,395 words and not once inside a Lenin quotation; in The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today (1981) it appears ninety-four times with the same result. Here the phrase appears three times, and again not once inside quotation marks attributed to Lenin. The pattern holds — with an honest qualification, which is that the doctrine is not this book's subject and it does not lean on the phrase. But the one place it does lean is exactly the place the pattern predicts. Listing what Lenin settled, the Foreword's neighbouring chapter runs through "the questions of war and peace, peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems, relations between socialist and capitalist countries, and the ways and means of building socialism and communism", and concludes that all of it "has been profoundly and comprehensively studied by Lenin." Studied, we are told; shown, we are not. Later, when the doctrine has to do political work — reconciling Communists and Socialists — it is stated flatly and sourced to nobody: "The policy of peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems has produced a real possibility of excluding world war from the life of human society even before socialism finally triumphs throughout the world." That is a third independent instance, in a third book, by a third set of hands. The pedigree is asserted in the author's voice and never once put inside the quotation marks.
The second habit fails here, and the failure is worth more than a confirmation would have been. In Arbatov (1973), Tomashevsky (1974) and Priorities (1981), Trotsky is presented as typical of the revolutionary-war position at Brest-Litovsk. He was not: that was Bukharin's position and the Left Communists'; Trotsky's was "neither war nor peace". This book does not commit the amalgam, because Brest-Litovsk is not in it. The string "Brest" occurs exactly once in the whole volume, and it is the French port, in a list of towns where workers occupied factories in May 1968. A book that mentions the Comintern 250 times, that narrates the international movement congress by congress from 1919 to 1943, simply does not go back to 1918. So: hypothesis refuted, and the refutation leaves a hole behind it, which is the more useful finding.
The legend does not disappear, though. It migrates. Ernest Mandel, writing at precisely this moment — "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution", International Socialist Review vol. 31 no. 2 (whole no. 197), March–April 1970, published while this volume was in press — named both halves of the operation in one sentence: "Of late, an attempt has been made to present Lenin as the father of the 'theory of peaceful coexistence,' and a parallel legend has been developed about Trotsky advocating 'instantaneous revolution' in all countries through military interventions of the Soviet state. Neither myth has any foundation, either in the theories or in the practices of the founders of the Soviet system and the Communist International." This book does not perform the first legend on Brest; it performs the second, twice. Trotsky and his supporters, we read, "believed socialism could not triumph in one country taken separately and that the world revolution had to be 'pushed' with every possible means"; and of the Comintern's Seventh Congress, "The Congress condemned the Trotskyite view that war cleared the way to revolution." Mandel's own account of Brest, in the same article, identifies the opponents of the peace as "the left SRs" and others "inside the Bolshevik Party", and records that Lenin "strongly approved of Trotsky's revolutionary agitation at Brest-Litovsk". The correction is not this series' invention. It was in print, from the other side, in the same season.
Which brings us to the most checkable falsification in the book, and the reason this volume is worth the reader's suspicion in detail rather than in general. Attacking the Fourth International, the monograph writes that its 1961 Manifesto, "the Charter of the Milan 'Unity Congress' of the Fourth International (1963) and other documents of modern Trotskyism contain the unsubstantiated assertion that the 'main centre of the world revolution' has now 'shifted to the colonial world'." From this it concludes that "his ideological successors maintain that at the present stage of social development the vanguard and main force of the world revolution are no longer the international working class ... but the colonial revolution."
The resolution of the 1963 reunification congress is "Dynamics of World Revolution Today", printed in full in the International Socialist Review, vol. 24 no. 4 (whole no. 165), Fall 1963. Its sentence reads: "the main center of world revolution shifted for a time to the colonial world." Two words have gone missing, and with them the tense: "shifted for a time" has become "has now shifted". The sentences immediately following say the opposite of what is imputed: "The view must be vigorously rejected that this development, unforeseen in the classics of Marxism, was more or less fatally determined by objective factors or by lack of revolutionary energy or will among the workers in the imperialist countries." The resolution then lists eleven occasions between 1918 and 1950 on which the working class of an imperialist country could have taken power, and attributes every failure not to backwardness or corruption in that class but "to the treacherous role of the official leadership". The book is refuting a position that its cited source explicitly and at length repudiates. This is not interpretation; it is an elision of two words, and either side can check it in an afternoon.
The rest of the record shows the same technique applied to people rather than documents. Trotsky appears nine times by surname and the adjectival forms another twenty-five. He is given a glossary entry — "The Trotskyites were opposed to Leninism as soon as Bolshevism emerged as an ideological trend. They rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat and held that socialism could not be built in the USSR" — followed by "In 1929 Trotsky was exiled", and a parenthetical "(1879–1940)" that gives the year of an assassination without mentioning that there was one. Zinoviev appears eleven times and Bukharin six, always and only as Comintern officials of 1921 to 1928, disputing the German united front or drafting a defective programme. Nowhere is it recorded that both were tried and shot. "Moscow Trials" returns zero. The word "purge" occurs four times, and not one of them refers to the 1930s. Stalin's name appears twice in 173,779 words, on both occasions as an authority approvingly cited inside 1920s material — "In Sun Yat-senism, which Stalin characterised as 'China's preparation for Marxism'" and "Comrade Stalin correctly pointed out that the Indian bourgeoisie wanted a compromise with British imperialism." He is never once present as the leader of the Soviet state or of the Communist International. Fourteen years after the Twentieth Congress, whose "main decisions" the book praises three times, the man is a footnote citation and nothing else.
The largest single silence is chronological. The Comintern chapter is thorough and dated to the month from 1919 to 1938: Munich is reached, and the joint appeal against it by "the Communist Parties of ten European countries, the USA and Canada" is quoted. Then the narrative encounters something it cannot say, and this is the whole of what it says: "Some difficulties arose in the communist movement in connection with sectarian trends and accompanying negative phenomena in the Comintern as well" — footnoted, without explanation, to Kommunist no. 5, 1969. Two sentences later the war has started and the section ends. The story resumes on 22 June 1941 with the French Communist Party's appeal that "Every Frenchman worthy of the name must henceforth regard himself as an ally of the USSR." Between September 1938 and June 1941 there is nothing. The Nazi–Soviet Pact is absent from the book; "Ribbentrop", "Molotov" and "Soviet-German" all return zero; of the four occurrences of "1939", two are bibliographic, one is a table row and one is a CPUSA membership figure. A history of the Communist International that runs from 1919 to the dissolution of 1943 has excised the twenty-one months in which the Comintern reclassified the war as imperialist on both sides and the French party — whose appeal of June 1941 it quotes — had spent the preceding period arguing precisely that. The dissolution itself is then rendered in the passive institutional voice: "the Presidium of the Comintern Executive, supported by all the Communist Parties, in May 1943 passed a decision to disband the Communist International. The Comintern's disbandment did not signify any weakening of the international communist movement." Mandel, in the same season, writes of "the decline and fall of the Comintern, and finally its dissolution by Stalin in 1943."
Spain gets forty-one mentions and no POUM, no May Days of 1937, no Nin. The blame for the Republic's internal difficulties falls on "the adventurism of the anarchist organisations, which concentrated chiefly on 'deepening the revolution', on immediate 'collectivisation' in the countryside and in the towns". China gets fifty-nine, and a sustained defence of the Comintern's Kuomintang policy, culminating in the claim that after Chiang Kai-shek's coup "the Comintern correctly explained that the success of that coup was due to the strength of the enemy and not to erroneous tactics by the Communist Party, as the opposition tried to make out." The reply to that was published in 1928 and is the third part of Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin, "Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution", which argues the case the book will not state: the demand was for Soviets and for the Communist Party's withdrawal from the Kuomintang. "The center of gravity consequently lay not in bare organizational forms, but in the class line." The Anglo-Russian Committee of 1925, which this volume praises, is dismantled in the same book, chapter II.
Czechoslovakia is the one place where the volume speaks in the present tense about a use of force, and it does not flinch. It is worth quoting whole: the Soviet Union "resolutely declared its readiness to defend Czechoslovakian independence in 1938, when the US, France and Great Britain betrayed it. In 1945 the Soviet Union liberated Czechoslovakia from nazi occupation at the cost of 140,000 Soviet soldiers, who lie buried in Czechoslovakian soil. In 1968, together with other Warsaw Treaty nations, it went to the aid of socialist Czechoslovakia against the dangers of subversion by anti-socialist elements linked with world imperialism." Lenin is then recruited in the next sentence, against "those who view things only from the standpoint of one's own country without reckoning with the interests of socialism on a world-wide scale." Elsewhere, in a footnote and nowhere else, both 1956 and 1968 are conceded as "grave difficulties in the development of countries like Hungary (1956) and, later, Czechoslovakia" — attributed to a doctrinal error about the class nature of socialist statehood in the late 1940s. A tank invasion has been made a consequence of a definitional slip made twenty years earlier.
On the day the book was written for, Intercontinental Press printed the answer. Its centenary issue (vol. 8 no. 15, 20 April 1970) carried Mandel's "Lenin's Heritage", which sets out seven "main pillars" of Leninism against the four signed chapters of Part One. Two of them bear directly here. The fifth is "the necessity of the independence of the Communist International from the Soviet state: no maneuver of that state ... should imply any change of orientation by the Communist International from its line of preparing, favoring, and assuring the best possible conditions for victory of proletarian revolutionary struggles everywhere." The seventh is inner-party democracy, and Mandel applies it at once: the Czechoslovak leadership's "hesitant attempt ... to return in 1968 to some of these Leninist norms in a new draft statute for the Fourteenth Congress of the party was seized upon furiously as a sign of 'rightist antisocialist tendencies' inside that party by Brezhnev and company." The same issue, with more brutality than accuracy is usually allowed, called the centenary output of the pro-Moscow parties "the scores of dreary hagiographical works the Communist parties have turned out for Lenin's one hundredth birthday this April 22." Part One of this book is exactly that. Part Two is not, and the distinction matters.
Because Part Two contains real work, and a reader told that everything here is worthless will be misled. The Comintern chapter is archival history built from the Executive's own records: the ECCI meeting of 22 February 1921 at which Zinoviev and Bukharin attacked the German party's Open Letter; Bohumir Smeral at the founding congress of the Czechoslovak party in May 1921; the Rovnost appeal of the Brno Workers' Council of 20 November 1921; the Czechoslovak party conference of September 1922 on the workers'-government slogan; the CPSU(B) Central Committee decision of 7 May 1927 on Zinoviev's Chinese theses. Much of this is sourced to Kommunistichesky Internatsional and to Comintern verbatim reports that have never appeared in English, and it is not fabricated. The reconstruction of the united-front turn of 1921–22, and of the debate over what a "workers' government" was to mean, is a serious piece of exposition whoever is doing it.
More surprising, the book performs one genuine self-criticism. On the Third Period it states plainly that "the formula 'social-fascism' was a grave mistake for it ignored the anti-fascist trends in the Social-Democratic Parties", and quotes Suslov, from the conference marking the Comintern's fiftieth anniversary as reported in Pravda in March 1969: "There was no justification for the thesis that Social-Democracy was the greatest danger. As a result, the main blow was for some time aimed at it and this, in effect, led to sectarianism." That is a real admission about the policy that helped deliver Germany to Hitler, and it is more than most of this catalogue manages. Note, though, what it costs and what it does not. The mistake has no author. It is the Comintern that "did not immediately appreciate" and the Parties that "regarded"; nobody chose it, nobody is named. Trotsky, by contrast, is named as the author of every error the book assigns to him. The volume's grammar changes according to who is at fault.
The book is also honest about Lenin in one place where honesty is inconvenient. It records, correctly, that "In criticising Trotsky during the debate on the trade unions, Lenin was explicit on the point that the problem of labour discipline should be solved by economic stimulation and promoting consciousness and not by militarising production which could alienate the worker masses from the Party" — an accurate account of a dispute in which Trotsky was in fact wrong and Lenin in fact opposed him, reported without embroidery. And in the same passage it quotes the resolution Lenin drafted for the Eighth Congress of the RCP(B): "Representatives of Soviet power who permit themselves to employ not only direct but even indirect compulsion to bring peasants into communes ... must be brought strictly to account and removed from work in the countryside." The book prints that. Two hundred pages away it also prints this: "The last exploiting class, the kulaks, was abolished on the basis of nation-wide collectivisation." It never notices that it has quoted Lenin's prohibition and celebrated the thing prohibited, on the largest scale in European history, in the same volume. The word "famine" occurs four times, all four about the relief campaign of 1921–22, when the Comintern appealed to the world proletariat to help Soviet Russia; the famine of 1932–33 does not exist here.
Finally, the long chapter on Herbert Marcuse — fifty-eight mentions, with One-Dimensional Man cited by edition, Alain Touraine engaged at length, and Marcuse's own disavowal fairly quoted ("It is the press and public opinion that have invested me with this title and have turned me into a best seller.... I am afraid that very few students have actually read my books") — is a serious attempt to argue with a live opponent rather than a caricature. It is also the book's tell, and the proportions say it better than any word-count could. Marcuse gets a chapter; Trotskyism gets a two-page detour. The volume's real anxiety, in 1970, is not the Fourth International or even Peking (mentioned once) but the student and New Left milieu of 1968 — a movement the book itself has to describe going past its own parties in the streets of Paris and Rome. The polemic against Trotskyism is a two-page detour with a doctored quotation in it. The polemic against Marcuse is a chapter, because Marcuse was the one taking the audience.
Read it, then, as what it is: a state institute's centenary offering, its political frame supplied by four party leaders and its substance by scholars who could do archival history well and were forbidden to reach three obvious conclusions — that Stalin existed, that the Pact happened, and that the Comintern was dissolved by a man rather than by a Presidium. Where its documents are quoted, they are usually quoted straight. Where its opponents are, they are not; and the 1963 resolution it misquotes has been in print in English since Fall 1963 for anyone who wants to check.