Almost every book in this series was written about Soviet power by people who served it — institute directors, academicians, editorial committees. This one was written by it. Following Lenin's Course collects the speeches and articles of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, delivered between the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1967 and the Sixth Congress of the Polish party in December 1971. It is the voice of the man himself, at the height of his authority, addressing his own Central Committee, the congresses of the fraternal parties, the collective farmers, the Komsomol. Progress Publishers put it into English in 1972 for the same reason it put out everything else: so that Communists and sympathisers from London to Lagos could read what Moscow wished to be understood as saying. The commission here is not scholarship dressed for export. It is the ruler's own account of himself, and it should be read as such — as evidence, not as history.
The value of that evidence is unusual. When a Progress textbook tells you that the Soviet state embodies socialist democracy, you are reading a functionary paid to say so. When Brezhnev tells you the same thing, you are reading the man who decides what the state does. The gap between the words and the deeds is therefore not the gap between a propagandist and reality; it is the gap between a ruler's self-description and his own conduct, and the conduct is a matter of record. The central fact about this book — the fact that governs how it must be read — is that its author, in August 1968, had ordered the armies of five Warsaw Pact states into Czechoslovakia to crush a reform movement inside the Communist Party there, and had justified that invasion with a doctrine of limited sovereignty that now carries his name. The speeches gathered here are the speeches of the author of the Prague intervention explaining why he follows Lenin's course. We can test that claim against the one thing this series usually lacks: the deeds of the man making it.
The volume is front-loaded with set-pieces. It opens with the November 1967 jubilee report, "Fifty Years of Great Achievements of Socialism," a canonical survey of the whole Soviet past — October, the Civil War, industrialisation, the collectivisation of 1929–30 (which the book calls "one of the key components of the socialist revolution," breaking "the resistance of the last and numerically largest exploiter class, the kulaks"), the Great Patriotic War, the postwar recovery. It closes with the great occasion of Brezhnev's early rule: the Report of the Central Committee to the 24th Party Congress of 30 March 1971, and the six-point programme of foreign policy — the "Peace Programme" — announced there. Between them sit the speeches to the international meeting of Communist parties in June 1969, the Lenin-centenary report of April 1970, and a chain of congress addresses to the Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, East German and Yugoslav parties.
Establish the date of the argument, not the date on the spine. The 1972 imprint is honest here: nothing in the book postdates December 1971, and the load-bearing texts are of 1969–71. This matters because it fixes what Brezhnev knew and had done when he spoke. The June 1969 speech was delivered ten months after the tanks entered Prague; the 24th Congress report, thirty-one months after. Czechoslovakia was not a distant memory to be smoothed over. It was the freshest and largest act of his own foreign policy, and — as we shall see — he did not smooth it over. He defended it.
The book's title is its thesis. Everything Brezhnev does, he does because Lenin would have done it; the legitimacy of the Soviet state and of his own leadership rests on unbroken descent from the founder. "Our Party and the Soviet people feel that the best way to express unbounded respect to the memory of Lenin is always and steadfastly to follow the course charted by him." The word Leninist is applied to everything — the general line, the principles of economic management, the standards of Party life, the policy of peace.
Two of these claims of descent are worth pinning down, because they can be checked, and because both recur across the whole series. The first is peaceful coexistence. Brezhnev repeatedly presents the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems as "a principle substantiated by Lenin," and in the Lenin-centenary report he is more specific: "It was Lenin who advanced the proposition for 'peaceful co-habitation' or, as we now call it, peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems." Notice what the quotation marks contain. They contain peaceful co-habitation — Brezhnev's own gloss on what Lenin supposedly said — not a quotation of Lenin using the phrase. This is a pattern the sibling volumes in this series display without exception: in D. Tomashevsky's Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations (Progress, 1974) the phrase "peaceful coexistence" never once appears inside a quotation from Lenin across the whole book, and in The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today (Progress, 1981) it occurs ninety-four times and never inside one. The pedigree is asserted in the leader's own voice and attached to a Party congress, not to a citable line of Lenin's. That is not an accident of Brezhnev's speechwriting. It is because the doctrine, as a doctrine, is not Lenin's; the earliest attested Soviet use of the actual phrase is Chicherin's, in 1920, a fact one of the Progress authors themselves supplies.
The second claim concerns the state. Here the book makes a move that ought to stop any reader who has opened Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917). Brezhnev announces that the Soviet state has changed its nature: "the Soviet state, which originally was a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has become a people's state, a political organisation of the whole people with the working class playing the leading role." This is the "state of the whole people" doctrine of the 1961 Party Programme, and it is offered as the fulfilment of Lenin. But The State and Revolution argues the opposite trajectory. Lenin's book is about the withering away of the state — about the proletarian half-state that, from the day after the revolution, begins to dissolve itself: standing army and police replaced by the armed people, officials elected, recallable at any moment, and paid no more than a worker's wage, the business of government simplified until, in Lenin's deliberately provocative image, any literate person can take a turn at it. The direction of travel is toward less state, administered by fewer specialists, dispersing power downward.
Brezhnev's direction of travel is the reverse. In the same 24th Congress report he calls, in the plainest terms, for the "further development of socialist democracy and consolidation of the Soviet state," and warns that "without a well-coordinated state machine, functioning smoothly in all its units, it is impossible to run the intricate and sensitive organism of a modern economy." Consolidation of the state machine; smoothly functioning units; a permanent, professionalised apparatus — this is the program of a ruling administration, and it is the antithesis of the pamphlet whose author he claims to be following. When Brezhnev defines democracy, he defines it as something granted from above: "We understand by democracy the involvement of the broadest working masses in social and political life, the provision of conditions in which they do indeed participate in running society." Involvement, provision of conditions, participation — the masses are invited in by a state that remains firmly other than them. Lenin's recallable, worker-waged, dissolving officialdom is nowhere. The word "course" in the title turns out to run in the opposite direction to the map.
The decisive material is what the speeches do with Czechoslovakia, and it is more damning than any paraphrase because Brezhnev says it himself, in public, to applause.
He does not hide the invasion; he defends it, twice, in two registers. The first is the general doctrine, stated at the June 1969 international meeting. After affirming that "the socialist countries stand for strict respect of the sovereignty of all countries," Brezhnev lays out the exception that swallows the rule: there are "general laws of socialist construction, deviations from which could lead to deviations from socialism as such," and "when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that country, a threat to the security of the socialist community as a whole, that is no longer a problem only of the people of the country in question, but a general problem, the concern of all the socialist countries." From which follows the licence to intervene: "such an action as military aid to a fraternal country in warding off a menace to the socialist system is an extraordinary, an enforced measure." This is the Brezhnev Doctrine, in Brezhnev's mouth, before the phrase was coined for it in the West — the doctrine that a socialist state's sovereignty is conditional on its remaining, in Moscow's judgment, socialist.
What makes the passage remarkable is that a few pages later, in the very same volume, Brezhnev denies the doctrine exists. Bourgeois propaganda, he complains, opposes proletarian internationalism to national independence, and for that purpose "imperialist propagandists have fabricated and put into circulation the notorious theory of 'limited sovereignty.'" The theory of limited sovereignty is an enemy invention — except that he has just stated it in his own name. The book contains both the doctrine and the disavowal of the doctrine, and the reader can hold them side by side.
The second register is the concrete defence, in the 24th Congress report. Here the "political crisis in Czechoslovakia" is addressed directly. The reform movement is redescribed as the work of "internal anti-socialist forces" and "Right-wing revisionism, which seeks, on the pretext of 'improving' socialism, to destroy the revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism." The invasion becomes an act of care: "we and the fraternal socialist countries then jointly took a decision to render internationalist assistance to Czechoslovakia in defence of socialism," compelled "by our class duty, loyalty to socialist internationalism." To seal it, Brezhnev quotes the post-invasion Czechoslovak leadership's own document, "Lessons of the Crisis Development," praising the occupation as an act that "saved the lives of thousands of men" and "blasted the hopes of the imperialist circles" — the conquered administration thanking its conquerors, read into the record as proof. He concludes that "the borders of the socialist community are immutable and inviolable."
This is the reflexivity test the series applies to every volume, and it fails it completely. Ask two questions of the book. Can the category it uses to condemn the enemy ever be turned on the author's own side? And is the charge attached to a described act that could be shown not to have happened? Brezhnev charges the Prague reformers with threatening "the security of the socialist community." But the only army that crossed a border in August 1968 was his. The only sovereignty violated was Czechoslovakia's. The "menace to the socialist system" is never specified as an act — no invasion planned by Prague, no capitalist restoration decreed, only reforms inside a Communist Party — while the counter-measure is the most specific act imaginable: half a million troops. The category points one way only. It is available to convict Dubček and unavailable, by construction, to describe what was done to him.
The Fourth International answered this argument the week it happened, not in retrospect. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued its statement on 22 August 1968, two days after the tanks moved, and Intercontinental Press carried it on 2 September (vol. 6, no. 28). Against Brezhnev's "internationalist assistance," it set four words: the Fourth International "condemns the military occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the nations of the Warsaw Pact." Against his claim that socialism itself was in danger, it set the counter-diagnosis this whole tradition rests on: "Socialism is not endangered in Czechoslovakia except by the crimes of the bureaucracy." The reformers were not agents of imperialism; they were Communists who "took into account the opinion of the workers of their country," and the statement demanded their release and appealed to the soldiers of the five occupying armies to leave. Where Brezhnev heard a menace to socialism, the Fourth International saw a bureaucracy defending its monopoly of power against its own working class.
That diagnosis was not improvised in 1968. It is Trotsky's, worked out in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), and it answers Brezhnev's doctrine of the state at its root. Trotsky's whole case is that the Soviet state did not do what Lenin's State and Revolution said it would. "It has not only not died away, but not begun to 'die away,'" he wrote of the state at the end of its second decade. "Worse than that, it has grown into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion. The bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses." For the defence of privilege the workers' state had been "compelled to create a 'bourgeois' type of instrument — that is, the same old gendarme, although in a new uniform." Brezhnev's "state of the whole people" is that gendarme's later self-portrait: an apparatus that has grown, consolidated and professionalised itself for four decades, announcing that it has become the people. Trotsky's category — the bureaucracy as "the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society," a caste that rules the masses rather than dissolving into them — explains both the invasion of 1968 and the doctrine used to justify it. A stratum whose power depends on the Party's monopoly cannot tolerate a reform that would open the monopoly, in Prague or anywhere else, and will call the tanks that defend it "internationalism."
On peaceful coexistence, the reply is equally precise and equally contemporary. Ernest Mandel, in "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution" (International Socialist Review, vol. 31, no. 2, March–April 1970), took up the exact manoeuvre this book performs. "Of late," Mandel wrote, "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." Mandel did not deny that a coexistence of states could be sound policy; he granted that "in that most general and abstract sense, the theory is of course correct" — a necessary armistice with capitalist states while the revolution is unfinished. What he denied was the pedigree, and the use to which the pedigree was put: the conversion of a tactical breathing-space into a strategic renunciation, blessed with Lenin's name. This series' companion volumes on the world movement make the same point from the other side — The Theory and Practice of Proletarian Internationalism (Progress, 1976) and Triumph of Lenin's Ideas (Progress, 1978) both perform the identical substitution of Moscow's foreign policy for Lenin's internationalism, and Socialism and Democracy (Progress, 1974) offers the identical redefinition of democracy as something a state provides. Brezhnev's book is the source document those textbooks elaborate.
There is a further claim in the book that the reply tradition answered long before Brezhnev made it: the claim to lead a world communist movement. The June 1969 international meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, which fills a long stretch of this volume, was convened to reassert Moscow's authority over that movement at the moment it was fracturing — against the Chinese party above all, whose "ideological-political platform" Brezhnev denounces as "incompatible with Leninism," and against every current inclined to read the Prague intervention as he feared it would be read. But the authority to speak for the world revolution in the name of Lenin's Comintern is precisely what Trotsky contested in The Third International After Lenin (1928): the doctrine of socialism in one country, he argued there, had already converted the Communist International from an instrument of world revolution into an instrument of Soviet state policy, its member parties trained to execute turns dictated in Moscow. A movement so constituted could applaud an invasion and call it internationalism — which, at the 1969 meeting and in the pages that record it, is what a good part of it did, while others, notably the Italians, would not.
A series of denunciations teaches nothing, and this book is not only a defence of the indefensible. Its foreign-policy core — the Peace Programme of the 24th Congress — was a genuine turn, and much of it was sane. The relaxation of tension in Europe that the West came to call détente was real, and the Soviet Union under Brezhnev drove a substantial part of it. The programme's concrete proposals were not empty: recognition of the postwar borders in Europe and the convening of an all-European security conference (which duly produced the Helsinki process); treaties putting a ban on nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons; an end to nuclear testing "by everyone and everywhere"; the dismantling of foreign military bases; a reduction of forces in Central Europe; negotiated cuts in military spending. The volume records the ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Brezhnev even reaffirms the standing offer of "a simultaneous annulment" of the Warsaw Treaty and NATO, or as a first step the dismantling of both blocs' military organisations. A world that had lived through the Cuban missile crisis had reason to welcome a Soviet leadership that wanted the arms race slowed and the German question settled by treaty rather than by confrontation. Where these initiatives were serious — and several were pursued and signed — they deserve to be credited as achievements of statecraft, not dismissed as camouflage.
The honest reading holds both halves together. The same book that defends the crushing of Czechoslovakia also proposes measures that reduced the risk of nuclear war, and both are Brezhnev's. Détente abroad and orthodoxy at home were not in contradiction for him; they were a single policy. A stabilised frontier in Europe and a recognised division of the continent were precisely the conditions under which "the borders of the socialist community" could be declared "immutable and inviolable" — the peace programme and the Prague doctrine are two faces of one settlement, in which the great powers agree not to disturb each other's spheres, and the peoples inside those spheres are not consulted. That is why the reader should neither swallow the book nor sneer at it. Its peace proposals were largely rational and partly realised. Its account of itself as Lenin's course was false, and it is false in a way the author, unusually, lets us verify against his own deeds.
Read it, then, for what it is: the testimony of a ruler, in his own words, at the moment of his greatest confidence. On the central question — is this Lenin's course? — the witness convicts himself. The man who invokes the author of The State and Revolution calls for the consolidation of the state machine; the man who invokes proletarian internationalism sends five armies across a socialist border and denies, in the same breath, the doctrine he has just proclaimed. Lenin wrote that officials should be recallable and the state should begin to wither the day after the revolution. Half a century after that revolution, this book is what its most powerful heir was actually building. The distance between the two is the subject of the whole series, and here, for once, we have it in the ruler's own hand.