The organising idea of this book is a calendar. Casting back over the whole history of the movement, S. Trapeznikov proposes "to define four basic periods of Marxism's ideological struggle against revisionism—that vehicle of bourgeois ideology within the labour movement." Each period has its heretics, each ends in their defeat, and each defeat is followed by a fresh outbreak. A periodisation of this kind is not a neutral device. It is a list of who was wrong at each stage of the past, drawn up in order to establish who is wrong now — and the most useful thing a reader can do with this volume is to work through the four periods and notice which names are written down, which are withheld, and which years the calendar declines to number at all.
The periods are these. The first runs from the 1840s to the 1890s, when Marxism fought its enemies from outside: Lassalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and — in an episode Trapeznikov handles well — the capture of the co-operative and trade-union movements by men like Louis Blanc, funded, he shows from the National Assembly debate of the day, by the French state. The second opens "at the close of the nineties" with revisionism inside the movement: Eduard Bernstein, Georg Vollmar, Rudolf Stammler, then Kautsky, Hilferding, Adler and Bauer. The third opens with October 1917, and its heretics are named at length. The fourth "takes its rise in the postwar period, viz., from the end of the forties to the beginning of the fifties," and here the naming stops.
Start with the third period, because it is where the book commits itself. Trapeznikov gives a full roll: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, the "Left" Communists, the Democratic Centralism group, the Workers' Opposition. He records their offices with bureaucratic exactitude — "Trotsky up to 1925 stood at the head of the Soviet Union's armed forces; Zinoviev was at the head of the Leningrad Party organisation and of the C.P.S.U.(B.) delegation to the Comintern; Kamenev was Chairman of the Politbureau of the Party's Central Committee; Rykov was head of the Government as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the U.S.S.R.; Bukharin was Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Pravda." He tracks Bukharin's positions from Brest-Litovsk to the "Get rich" slogan with a specificity that suggests he has read the congress transcripts. He narrates the 1927 discussion, the four thousand oppositionists in a party of 700,000, the Fifteenth Congress expulsions. And then, of the men he has just catalogued, he writes: "We have no intention of delving into the measure of guilt of this or that member of the opposition."
Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow trial. Tomsky killed himself the same month rather than wait for his. Bukharin and Rykov were shot in March 1938 after the third. Trotsky was killed in Coyoacán in August 1940. The book says none of this. It says instead that the Central Committee, in the struggle against them, "did not resort to the simple expedient of weeding out the otherwise-minded, but confided the whole political 'quarrel' to the arbitrament of the Party." The quotation marks around "quarrel" are Trapeznikov's.
Nor is this a narrative that stops at the edge of the Terror and resumes on the far side. The narrative runs straight through. From the Fifteenth Congress the sentences proceed to "the victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R., the gigantic strides in industrialisation, the socialist remodelling of agriculture and the cultural revolution," then to the anti-fascist war. The Seventeenth Congress of 1934 appears, and is used as evidence of the oppositionists' duplicity: "at the 17th Congress of the Party they all renounced their erroneous platforms and conceptions and swore to march in step with the Party. But this was a technique they had often used before." Khrushchev told the Twentieth Congress in February 1956 that of the 1,966 delegates to that Congress, 1,108 were later arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes, and that 98 of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee it elected were shot. Trapeznikov cites the Congress and passes on. Two paragraphs after invoking it he writes that Communists "will always remember and honour the memory of their unforgettable leaders, the Leninist guard of brave professional revolutionaries." The Leninist guard was destroyed in 1937 and 1938 by the party whose continuity this book exists to assert.
The mid-thirties do appear, once, and in the prosecution's voice: "Many publications have appeared in the world today whose authors testify to the fact that in the mid-thirties there existed in the U.S.S.R. illegal organisations uniting politically and ideologically demoralised elements from Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Bukharinites." That is the charge sheet of 1936–38, re-entered in 1972 on the authority of unnamed "publications," sixteen years after the Twentieth Congress and eleven after the Twenty-Second. Neither of those congresses is mentioned anywhere in the book. The Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth are cited repeatedly. The single sentence conceding that anything went wrong reads in full: "The activities of our Party suffered at a definite stage from similar shortcomings and mistakes. We shall not go into the details here, since this question has been fully and adequately dealt with in the Party's published documents concerning the personality cult, voluntarism and subjectivism." The bundling is deliberate — "voluntarism and subjectivism" was the post-1964 formula for Khrushchev, so Stalin's cult and his denouncer's failings are filed together as administrative untidiness — and the verdict follows at once, in the sentence this series keeps meeting in different Progress volumes: "They did not and could not alter the character of the Soviet socialist system."
The name Stalin does not occur in these 107,000 words. It occurs only inside the word "Stalinists," and there only as an insult attributed to others: revisionists, we are told, "were really the first to start dividing Communists into orthodox and unorthodox, hardliners and progressists, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. They have now given currency to new terms—neo-Stalinists and super-Stalinists."
Whoever wrote that was not a private scholar. The book itself says what it grew out of: addresses delivered "at a general meeting of scientists at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, conferences of department heads and social science instructors of higher educational institutions, seminars of ideological workers in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, Riga, Yaroslavl and other cities." An author addresses the Academy in plenary session; he instructs the country's social-science teachers; he devotes his final chapter to the Central Committee's ruling of 14 August 1967 "On Measures for Developing the Social Sciences," which he treats as a programme he is charged with carrying out; and he lays down that "the social sciences are of a profoundly partisan nature" and that "the more consistently the principle of science's partisanship is applied the more exact, comprehensive and profound will the acquired knowledge be." He also rules on what may be written: it is not correct, he says, "when the over-emphasis laid on shortcomings in some historical publications and works of fiction overshadow the heroic struggle and selfless labour of the Soviet millions." He mentions in passing that he heard Djilas lecture at the Party Higher School in 1946.
The identification is not left to inference. When the Russian edition appeared in the summer of 1971, Intercontinental Press noticed it — reporting Brezhnev's visit to Belgrade, and quoting the New York Times correspondent Alfred Friendly Jr., it described "a book published in Moscow this summer, written by Sergei Trapeznikov, head of the Soviet Communist party Central Committee's department of science and higher education," which called Yugoslavia "a right-revisionist bridgehead established by world imperialism within the Socialist camp" ("Brezhnev Denies 'Brezhnev Doctrine'," vol. 9 no. 35, 11 October 1971). The phrase is in the volume you are holding. So the man who was silent about the fate of the Left Opposition was the official responsible for the conditions under which Soviet historians worked.
That is the context for the fourth period, and for the strangest fact about it. The fourth period's Right revisionism begins in Yugoslavia — that is what the "bridgehead" sentence is about. Tito's name does not appear in the book. Neither does the League of Communists, except once, in the clause recording that Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer were expelled from it. The entire indictment of Yugoslavia is conducted through two men Yugoslavia had already thrown out, one of them "that fire-eater of modern revisionism." The fourth period's "Left" revisionism is China. The word China occurs once in the book, in a sentence about the Sino-Japanese war of 1894. Peking does not occur. Mao does not occur. The only trace is a single adjective — "the 'Left' quasi-revolutionaries of the Maoist trend" — and one buried riposte, that "imperialism is by no means a 'paper tiger'." A book whose whole purpose is to identify the enemies of Marxism-Leninism in 1972 cannot write the names of the two states it is attacking. It reaches them instead through Djilas and Dedijer, through Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fischer — expelled from the French and Austrian parties in 1970 and 1969 — and through Ota Šik, whose economic reform is dismissed in a clause about "modern revisionists of the Sik type." Readers of Basmanov and Leibzon's The Revolutionary Vanguard (1977) will recognise the method; what is worth noticing is that here it is already being used against governments, five years earlier.
Czechoslovakia is handled the same way. The 1968 invasion is never described. What appears instead is a diagnosis — "This is distinctly traceable in the case of the events in Czechoslovakia. If the former leadership of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had discovered in time and properly rebuffed the adroit strategy of imperialism the events which caused such grievous consequences might never have taken place" — supported by a Brezhnev quotation and a speech Gustáv Husák gave in the Kremlin, reported in Pravda on 28 October 1969. Dubček is not named. The five armies are not named. In their place stands a general principle: "any kind of military interference by the imperialists in any socialist country is bound to meet with an organised rebuff to the enemy on the part of the whole socialist community of nations." That is the Brezhnev Doctrine, phrased so that the tanks become a defence against an invasion that did not occur.
None of this makes the book useless, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The second period is genuinely researched. Trapeznikov quotes Evolutionary Socialism from the 1909 Independent Labour Party edition and reproduces Bernstein's actual positions — that dialectics is "the traitor within Marx's doctrine, a pitfall in the path towards a correct judgement of things," that whether the labour theory of value holds is "immaterial." His account of what happened to Engels's 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France is substantially right and rests on the letters: Engels protesting to Kautsky that he had been "trimmed in such a fashion that I appear as peaceful worshipper of legality at any price," the unexpurgated text not published until the Marx–Engels Institute issued it in the 1920s. The pages on Bebel, Mehring and Luxemburg being smeared inside their own party are drawn from Aus meinem Leben and from Luxemburg's collected works and are worth reading. So is the observation that the co-operative movement grew fastest after defeats — Chartism, 1848, 1905 — which is a real historical argument, not a slogan. And the long quotation from Giolitti's Senate speech of 26 September 1920, explaining why he chose not to clear the occupied Italian factories by force, is a document any historian of that year would want.
The chapters on the scientific and technological revolution are weaker than the reader has been promised. They are lecture prose, and where they touch the questions the Western left was actually arguing about in 1972 — automation, the growth of the technical intelligentsia, what happens to a working class when its composition changes — they announce that under socialism labour "acquires the quality of an engineer's or technician's work" and move on. The one section with real bite is the attack on convergence theory, and it is undermined by its own citations. Trapeznikov's central point — that theories of the "integrated industrial society" work by bracketing the ownership of the means of production — is fair, and the Western left made it too. But he calls Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber "a prominent French ideologist, proponent of the convergence theory" and then quotes Le Défi américain warning that free American capital will reduce Europe "to the status of a satellite," which is an argument about capitalist rivalry, not convergence. And he presents Brzezinski and Huntington as stating "point-blank" a proposition that his own quotation shows them merely summarising: the sentence he reproduces begins "the widespread theory of convergence assumes." It is the exposition of a thesis their book was written to dispute.
One claim should be corrected flatly, because it is defamation of a dead man and it is checkable. Among the charges against Social-Democracy the book states: "Karl Kautsky, the ideological leader of German Social-Democracy, received from Hitler a life pension." Kautsky left Germany for Vienna in 1924; his books were burned by the Nazis in 1933; after the Anschluss of March 1938 he fled to Prague and then to Amsterdam, where he died in October 1938, in exile and without means. He received nothing from Hitler.
The deeper failure is structural. In this book revisionism never has an internal cause. It is always penetration — the bourgeoisie "wormed its way," "built up its agent-force within it," worked "through its infiltrated agents." Revisionism is "an infernal machine for corrupting cadres." From which it follows that four defeats have produced four revivals with no explanation available for why, and that the only remedy the schema permits is policing. It is a theory of heresy written by a man whose job was to enforce orthodoxy, and it cannot ask why so many communists, in so many countries, kept arriving at conclusions the Central Committee had ruled out.
The answer this book could not print was being printed. Trotsky had set out the analysis of the bureaucracy that the third period requires and cannot supply, in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and The Stalin School of Falsification (English edition, 1937); the Dewey Commission's Not Guilty (1938) had examined the charges Trapeznikov quietly re-endorses. And in the very year this translation appeared, an answer was circulating from inside the Soviet Union: Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, written in samizdat by a communist expelled from the party in 1969, published in English by Knopf in 1971 and reviewed by Dianne Feeley in Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 21, 29 May 1972 — a book that names the Moscow trials, the Kirov assassination and the destruction of the officer corps, and that Trapeznikov's department existed to keep out of Soviet bookshops. Intercontinental Press returned to the Medvedev brothers and the currents around them in "The Medvedevs — A Trend in the Soviet Opposition," vol. 10 no. 44, 4 December 1972. Two histories of the same party, written in the same city in the same years: one by a man with an office in the Central Committee, one by a man who typed his manuscript in secret. Only one of them can name the General Secretary who ran the party for thirty years.