This is the official Soviet history of the Communist International — the Third International, the Comintern — from its founding under Lenin in March 1919 to its dissolution by Stalin in June 1943. It was produced by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, by a group of seven historians headed by A. I. Sobolev, and issued by Progress in Bernard Isaacs's translation under the modest Russian title Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk — "short historical sketch." At some 207,000 English words it is not short, and it is not a sketch. It is the institutional self-portrait of the organisation whose degeneration called the whole anti-Stalinist tradition into being, and no book in this series is more directly the thing that tradition exists to answer.
The credentials are worth reading closely, because they announce what kind of document this is. The title page thanks, "with the co-operation of," a roll of surviving Comintern leaders and functionaries — Walter Ulbricht, Dolores Ibárruri, Jacques Duclos, Tim Buck, Palme Dutt, Boris Ponomarev and others. These were not consulted historians; several were participants defending their own past. The head of the authorial group, A. I. Sobolev, is the same Sobolev who sits as a Deputy Chairman of the editorial committee of the International Working-Class Movement volumes elsewhere in this catalogue, under the chairmanship of Ponomarev — who also appears here among the co-operators, and who as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee had in 1971 instructed cadres to expose Trotskyism's "kinship with open anti-Communism." This is not an outside scholar's account of the Comintern. It is the apparatus writing the history of the apparatus.
The copyright page reads © Progress Publishers 1971, "First printing 1972." Nothing internal contradicts it: the latest events the book can reach are the international Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in 1969 and the Karlovy Vary conference of European Communist parties of April 1967. This is a genuine text of 1970–71, not a lagged reprint dressed in a later jacket. That places it squarely in the confident middle of the Brezhnev years, and its confidence is the confidence of an institution that believes the storms are behind it. De-Stalinisation has been quietly halted; the "cult of personality" formula of 1956 survives as a fixed, minimal concession rather than a live inquiry; and the book fights on two fronts at once. It defends Moscow's line against the Trotskyism it inherited as an enemy, and against the Maoism that had split the world movement in the decade just past. The Sino-Soviet rupture is the loudest silence and the loudest noise in the book together: Chapter Seven closes with a sustained denunciation of "the Mao Tse-tung group, which has sunk to anti-Leninist positions and is pursuing a Leftist adventurist policy of great-power chauvinism," while the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 — the event that convened the very 1969 Meeting the book treats as its terminus — is nowhere mentioned at all. A history that ends in 1943 was under no obligation to discuss 1968; but a book so anxious about the "unity of the communist movement," written in the year after Warsaw Pact tanks entered Prague, tells its date by what it will not name.
A critical introduction to a Progress volume usually has to hunt for the salvageable. Here it is not hard to find, and honesty about it is the price of being believed on everything else. The early chapters — the Comintern of Lenin, the first four congresses of 1919 to 1922 — are, within the limits of their piety, a serviceable and often faithful record. The book reconstructs the founding congress, the drafting of the Twenty-One Conditions, the debates of the Second Congress in real detail. It gives Lenin's theses on the national and colonial questions their proper weight, and states their core correctly: that victory over world imperialism is "impossible without an alliance between the revolutionary proletariat and the national liberation movement." It follows the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East (1922), the anti-imperialist united front of the Fourth Congress, the League Against Imperialism of 1927 — the real and lasting contributions of the early International to the theory of colonial revolution. It even records, without flinching, that the united-front tactic was born against resistance from within the Comintern's own leadership: that in 1921 the "Open Letter" of the German party was condemned as "a non-revolutionary act" by none other than the Comintern's chairman Zinoviev and by Bukharin, and that Lenin had to intervene to defend it as "a model political step."
This is the tragedy the book cannot see because it is standing inside it. The distance between the Comintern that debated the workers' government and the colonial united front in 1920, and the instrument that branded Social Democrats "social fascists" in 1931 and endorsed the shooting of its own leaders in 1938, is the whole subject of the anti-Stalinist critique — and it is a distance the Outline History is structurally unable to measure, because measuring it would mean admitting that the line changed, and changed catastrophically, at the dictation of a faction. So the book narrates a continuous, self-correcting ascent, in which every turn was basically right, every error was a "sectarian deviation" promptly overcome, and the leadership that presided over the founding congress and the leadership that presided over the Terror are the same unbroken "Leninist" thread. The material for the counter-history is often present in the book's own pages. It has only to be read against the grain the authors cut.
The sharpest instrument this series has is also the simplest: who is quoted to his own words, and who is only characterised. An opponent who is cited can be checked; an opponent who is only described cannot. In the companion IWCM volumes the test is stark — volume three cites Luxemburg's collected works sixteen times and Trotsky not once, though it attributes a whole doctrine to him. The Outline History is a shade less absolute: Trotsky is actually quoted here, a handful of times. But he is quoted exclusively as a defendant, in fragments selected to make him absurd — his China polemics turned into self-parody, his 1928 protest to the Sixth Congress cited only to be dismissed — and never once as what he in fact was, a leader of the Communist International in its first years, the author of several of its founding manifestos. The label attached to him is fixed and prior to any argument: a resolution of the Fifth ECCI Plenum, which the book endorses, defines Trotskyism as "a system of fighting Leninism of many years standing." Once the category is settled as an essence, the quotations serve only to illustrate it.
The most telling result of the test, though, is not about quotation but about death. The Comintern's first president was Grigory Zinoviev; the book names him more than thirty times, correctly, as chairman of its Executive from 1919. Its second dominant figure at the top was Nikolai Bukharin, who drafted the Comintern's programme and sat as deputy chairman of its Executive; the book names him too, and even records, in 1929, the ECCI plenum's decision "to remove Bukharin from his work in the Comintern" for a "Right deviation platform." Both men led the Communist International. Both men were shot — Zinoviev in August 1936 after the first Moscow trial, Bukharin in March 1938 after the third. The Outline History never says so. It never mentions the Moscow trials at all; the phrase does not occur in the book. Zinoviev and Bukharin simply cease to be spoken of once their political defeat is narrated, and the reader who did not already know their fate would close this history believing its first two presidents had merely lost an argument. The same erasure swallows Béla Kun, praised on one page as an "outstanding leader" of the Hungarian party and present at the Seventh Congress of 1935, then gone — arrested and shot in 1938, though the book records only his sectarian errors and his silence thereafter. Pyatnitsky, the organisational secretary who ran the apparatus for a decade, is named among the leaders of the mid-1930s and then vanishes on the same road. This is the citation test in its most damning form: the men the International cannot bring itself to bury are exactly the men it had murdered.
Everything turns on Germany. The Comintern's "Third Period" line, adopted from 1928 and hardened at the ECCI plenums of 1929–31, declared Social Democracy a variant of fascism — "social fascism" — and the main enemy, forbidding the united front with the Social-Democratic workers precisely when Hitler's movement was mounting. The result was that the two mass parties of the German working class, the Communists and the Social Democrats, marched separately to the greatest defeat in the history of the labour movement, and Hitler took power in January 1933 without a shot fired against him. This is the event that made Trotsky abandon the demand to reform the Communist International and call for a new one. How the Outline History handles it is the measure of the whole book.
The handling is more self-critical than a reader might expect — and the shape of that self-criticism is itself the finding. Post-1956 Soviet historiography could concede the "social fascism" slogan as an error, because the corrective was itself a Comintern act: the Seventh Congress of 1935 and the turn to the popular front. So the book does concede it, in the abstract. It calls the equation of Social Democracy with fascism "a mistake"; it writes plainly that "it would be wrong, however, to apply this appellation to Social-Democracy and the reformist trade unions as a whole," and that "the social-fascism formula prevented the Communists from taking timely notice of the fact that with the onset of fascism the Social-Democrats... were capable of taking part in the anti-fascist struggle." As a sentence about a formula, that is very nearly correct.
But watch what happens when the book stops discussing the formula in general and reaches January 1933 in particular. "On January 30, 1933," it writes, "the monopolists put Hitler into power" — and the responsibility for the disaster is now placed, wholly and precisely, on the Social Democrats. The German Communist Party, in this telling, "made about a dozen offers to the Social-Democratic Party of Germany to organise a general strike against fascism, but each time received a refusal." The KPD is the party of unity heroically rebuffed; the SPD "torpedoed" the general strike. The causal arrow of the anti-Stalinist critique — that it was the Comintern's own line, dictated from Moscow, that made the united front impossible for years before January 1933, that "social fascism" was the doctrine which taught Communist workers to see Social-Democratic workers as the main enemy — is reversed. The error is conceded as a slogan and denied as a cause. And the concession is hedged even as a slogan: the "social-fascism" formula, the book insists, was a natural "reaction" to the treachery of the reformist leaders, who gave "definite grounds" for the charge. The Comintern is criticised for a tactical excess; it is never allowed to have lost Germany.
What the book does not stint on is the price. It records, without euphemism, the destruction of the German party: "Out of the 300,000 Communists which the Party had in 1933, 150,000 were subjected to persecutions and thrown into prisons and concentration camps, where they died by the thousand" — among them Ernst Thälmann, murdered at Buchenwald. (The extract prints "1953" for 1933, a plain scanner slip; the passage is about the Nazi terror on the KPD.) Here the vocabulary of atrocity is unstinting and exact. The reader should hold that exactness in mind, because a few chapters on, when the killing is done not by the Gestapo but by the NKVD, the same book will find only the palest words for it.
The direct answer to the whole passage was written, in real time, by the man the book quotes only to ridicule. More than a year before Hitler took power, in "For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism" (8 December 1931), Trotsky told the German Communists that the Central Committee's line "proceeds from the recognition of the inevitability of a fascist victory," and gave them the formula the Comintern would not adopt until 1935, when it was five years too late: "March separately, but strike together!" His warning does not read, at this distance, as factional prophecy but as plain sight: "Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions... Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank... Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!" The Outline History now endorses, in retrospect and in the abstract, the united-front policy Trotsky demanded on the day — while recording him, in its own narrative of those years, only as one of those who "described fascism as a supraclass power, a sort of Bonapartism." That the correction the book makes in 1971 was the argument Trotsky was expelled and hounded for making in 1931 is the fact the book is built not to notice.
After 1935 the book is on ground it likes: the popular front, the Spanish Republic, the anti-fascist congresses, the mass parties of France. This is the period it treats as the Comintern's vindication, and it makes the case at length. A reader from this tradition enters two corrections. The first is that the popular front, as practised, meant the subordination of the workers' movement to the defence of bourgeois-democratic and imperial states — that in Spain it meant, alongside the fight against Franco, the suppression of the POUM and the crushing of the collectives, of which this triumphal narrative says nothing. The second is the one the book cannot keep entirely off the page, because by 1971 the Party's own line required a minimal admission: the Terror.
Here is the whole of what a 207,000-word official history of the Comintern will say about the fact that the Soviet state murdered more Comintern cadres in Moscow than every bourgeois government on earth combined. Stalin, the book allows, "had great services to his credit," but "the cult of Stalin's personality" led "to the violation of Lenin's principles of collective leadership and of socialist legality, and to repressions against people who were dedicated to the cause of the Party and the people." Its effects "told also on the Communist International": leaders "were accused in 1937 and 1938 of Trotskyism, of plotting and spying for the imperialist powers, and were subjected to repressions." The one concrete case it names is the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland, "unjustly accused of letting its leadership pass into the hands of the class enemies," which the ECCI Presidium ordered disbanded in August 1938 — and which the book can admit was a crime only because a joint statement of five parties had rehabilitated it in 1956, a footnote the Outline History duly cites to Pravda.
Read that against what actually happened and the euphemism becomes an indictment. The entire leadership of the Polish party was summoned to Moscow and shot; the party was not merely "dissolved" but decapitated. The German and Hungarian émigré Communists who had fled to the "homeland of socialism" were liquidated there in numbers Hitler could not reach. The book supplies none of this: no figure, no name of a single executed cadre, and — most precisely — not the word. Search the Outline History and you will find "executions" and "mass executions" used freely and correctly, for the crimes of the ruling classes, of the White terror, of the men who killed Sacco and Vanzetti. For Stalin's victims the book has only "repressions," "unjustly accused," "negative features." The vocabulary of murder is reserved for the class enemy and withheld from the apparatus. And even the pale admission is fenced with justification: "Obviously, the plottings of international imperialism, the existence of a hostile capitalist encirclement and the counter-revolutionary attacks of the Trotskyites created within the country an atmosphere of tension which called for greater cohesion within the Party." The victims are conceded to have been "honest"; the machine that killed them is left standing, its logic half-endorsed. It is worth adding, since this series holds itself to its own standard, that the book's own vocabulary is exact when it wants to be: it calls Mao Tse-tung's purges of the 1940s "unwarranted repressions" without hesitation. The euphemism, in other words, is not a limit of the Russian language. It is a choice, applied to Moscow's crimes and lifted for Peking's.
The Comintern was dissolved in the spring of 1943, at the height of the wartime alliance, weeks after Stalingrad. The book presents this as the organisation's mature and voluntary self-liquidation: the sections had grown strong, "leadership from a single centre" had become "an obstacle," and the Presidium of the ECCI, "on the basis of a thorough analysis of the political situation," proposed dissolution to parties which approved it all but unanimously. "The subsequent course of events," the book concludes, "confirmed the correctness and timeliness of the decision." Of the reason the timing was what it was — that Stalin dissolved the International as a reassurance to Churchill and Roosevelt, a demonstration that Moscow had no designs on the internal affairs of its allies — the book says only, obliquely, that the Comintern's existence was being used by "reactionaries" and "Nazi propaganda" to frighten the bourgeoisie of the coalition, and that removing the pretext served the anti-fascist cause. The subordination of the world revolutionary organisation to the diplomatic convenience of the Soviet state, which is what the dissolution was, is thus rendered as the organisation's own gift to the struggle. And the book cannot resist the era's polemic even here: it notes that the "only exception" to the unanimous approval was the Chinese Communist Party, which stressed that it "considered itself free from obligations towards the world communist movement" — a 1971 thrust at Peking, planted in the record of 1943.
The reply to this book is unusually complete, because its subject is the exact subject on which the anti-Stalinist left wrote most and best. On the fight the book calls "the defeat of Trotskyism," the answer is Trotsky's own The Third International After Lenin (1928), the direct counter-history of the very degeneration the Outline History narrates as an ascent. On the method — the mined quarrel, the suppressed record, the leader unpersoned — it is The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), which describes this book's procedure more precisely than any critique written since. On Germany, the reply is a shelf: The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany (1930), the German writings of 1931–33 gathered in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, and the moment of rupture itself, "It Is Impossible to Remain in the Same International with the Stalins, Manuilskys, Lozovskys & Co." (June 1933). For the Terror as it fell, there is the Left Opposition's own Biulleten' Oppozitsii, reporting the frame-ups as they happened. The reader who wants the men and women this book cannot mention will find them named, and their ends recorded, in those pages.
But the final test to apply to the Outline History is not one of citation or of vocabulary alone, both of which our own tradition has at times failed too. It is the test of reflexivity: can the categories the book wields ever be turned on the speaker? The book is built so that they cannot. Opportunism, sectarianism, splitting, adventurism, great-power chauvinism — every one of these is a charge the CPSU levels and never answers; the Party is always the subject combating the disease, never a possible carrier of it. The line was never wrong, only the deviations from it; the leadership never failed, only the leaders who were expelled from it; the dead were "unjustly accused," but by no one the book will name, of crimes it will not describe, in a Terror it calls a "cult." A history that can convict Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kun and Mao, and can find no fault in the institution that shot four of them and split with the fifth, has told you its real subject. It is not the history of the Communist International. It is the case for the prosecution that outlived the accused, written by the office that filed the charges.