This is not a Progress Publishers book. The catalogue files it as one, and the words "Progress Publishers" do occur in it — exactly once, in the Publishers' Note, where the compilers explain that "The translations come from Progress Publishers' edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works in 45 volumes." That is the whole of Moscow's imprint on this volume. The colophon on the last page reads:
Editor: M. Saifulin / Technical Editor: F. Masek / Published by International Organization of Journalists, Prague 1, Pařížská 9 / Printed: Svoboda, branch 2, Praha 1, Ostrovní 30
It is a Prague book, printed in Czechoslovakia at the Svoboda works, and it was commissioned rather than written. The Publishers' Note says so plainly: "The present volume has been prepared by the Union of Soviet Journalists and the Union of German Journalists (G.D.R.) at the request of the International Organisation of Journalists." An editorial board of six is named — A. F. Berezhnoi, B. D. Datsyuk, E. Duziska, Y. N. Zassoursky, A. Z. Okorokov, B. Yanel — with three Soviet compilers, G. A. Golovanova, L. P. Yevseyeva and R. P. Ovsepyan, and an English-edition compiler, A. N. Burmistenko. The book runs to 483 pages. It is the third title in this series whose spine has been credited to a house that did not publish it.
Dating it from the inside is harder than usual, because the copyright page did not survive scanning. What survives points the same way as the spine. The latest work cited anywhere in the volume is its own Russian parent, the collection Lenin About the Press, Moscow 1959, from which the government decrees in the Supplement are taken; the next latest is Decrees of Soviet Power, Moscow 1957. The English Collected Works volumes cited run up to volume 36, which appeared in 1966, and the Publishers' Note describes the English set as complete at forty-five volumes, which it became in 1970. Nothing in the book is dated later. 1972 is consistent with all of it, and I have argued from that date.
Take the year and the city seriously, because everything difficult about this book is in them.
In April 1972, in Prague, the reconstituted Union of Czech Journalists held a convention. Its new president, Josef Valenta, told 272 delegates representing 2,700 members that more than 1,200 journalists in the Czech lands had been dismissed from their jobs since the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 — of whom, he said, 255 were "aggressive deviationists" and 150 their "fellow travelers". Intercontinental Press carried the report in vol. 10 no. 20, 22 May 1972, p. 581, under the heading "2,200 Journalists Fired Since 1968", sourcing Valenta's figures to Le Monde of 26 April and adding the Danish daily Politiken's estimate of about a thousand more in Slovakia: "Thus the total for the country as a whole would seem to be 2,200 persons — out of 4,000 journalists, radio and TV personnel working in the profession at the time the Soviet-led armies moved into the country." And: "The dismissed journalists have not been allowed to return to their profession, and most have had to find unskilled jobs."
Half the journalists in a country lost their profession, and it was their own union that counted them. In the same city, in the same year, the International Organization of Journalists — which had been headquartered in Prague since 1947 — published a 483-page volume of Lenin whose fourth section is titled "Freedom of the Press."
The purge was not abstract in that year either. In February 1972, Ferdi Zidar, a former editor of the Italian Communist paper l'Unità and, according to James Feron in the New York Times, then secretary of the International Organization of Journalists itself, was expelled from Czechoslovakia on three hours' notice "on charges of having spoken with former party officials" in Prague; Feron added that "Western newsmen have been quietly warned to stay away from former party officials and dissident newsmen" (Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 7, 21 February 1972). A year earlier, on 19 March 1971, sixteen young Czechoslovaks had been sentenced in Prague for organising a Revolutionary Socialist Party and printing leaflets; their leader, the twenty-nine-year-old teacher Petr Uhl, received four years, the rest one to two and a half. Reuters, reported in Intercontinental Press vol. 9 no. 12, 29 March 1971, p. 266, recorded that Uhl acknowledged writing the group's 1969 manifesto and "told the court that his views and activities were aimed not against socialism, society or the working class, but against the bureaucracy and the state apparatus." In May 1972 the chess grandmaster Ludvík Pachman was tried in Prague for discussing, in a Dutch radio interview, the four-year sentence passed on the journalist Vladimír Škutina; the trial was officially "public" and admitted his wife and six workers holding special cards.
That is the room this book was printed in.
And now the thing that a reader of this series will not expect, and which has to be reported as a result rather than smoothed away: the book itself does not falsify Lenin.
The method that has produced this project's sharpest findings is to take a Soviet anthology, find the Collected Works original of each excerpted item, and read past the closing quotation mark. Applied here, over a wide sample, it returns almost nothing. The volume has about 220 items, of which the contents page marks 109 as "(Extract)" or "(Extracts)" — a much heavier rate of excerpting than the 1947 Marx — Engels — Marxism, where eighteen items of forty carried the marker. But where that volume's cuts fell in a pattern, these do not. What is more striking is what survives whole.
"Party Organisation and Party Literature" (1905) is printed complete. This is the article the Soviet cultural apparatus spent decades repurposing as a general theory of literature, usually by quoting the passage about the "cog and a screw" and stopping. Here the whole thing is printed, including the paragraph that makes the repurposing impossible: "First of all, we are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views. Freedom of speech and the press must be complete." The volume even files the article under "Basic Principles of the Revolutionary Press" rather than among aesthetics — which is where Lenin put it.
The letter to G. Myasnikov of 5 August 1921 — Lenin's answer to a Bolshevik metalworker who had demanded "freedom of the press, from the monarchists to the anarchists, inclusively" — is printed entire and unsoftened, down to "We have no wish to commit suicide, and therefore, we will not do this."
Lenin's speech on the press to the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of 4 November 1917 is printed to its last sentence, and it twice says "Trotsky was right" — including in its opening line: "Trotsky was right: the officer cadets staged their uprising, and war was declared in Petrograd and Moscow for freedom of the press." "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (March 1922) opens: "Comrade Trotsky has already said everything necessary, and said it very well, about the general purposes of Pod Znamenem Marksizma." Elsewhere the volume reprints a Bolshevik Central Committee announcement recording that "the Central Committee is enlisting the services of Comrade Trotsky, who has succeeded in establishing his own popular organ — Russkaya Gazeta." None of this is glossed. The Name Index gives Trotsky eighteen page references and no characterisation, exactly as it gives Zinovyev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, Preobrazhensky, Sokolnikov and Shlyapnikov theirs. Stalin appears in the body of this 205,000-word book once, as the addressee of a letter of 6 December 1912, and the index gives him a single page.
Nor does the selection flinch from Lenin's hardest positions. "The Tasks of the Revolution" (October 1917) is printed saying: "It is necessary to suppress the bourgeois counter-revolutionary papers (Rech, Russkoye Slovo, etc.), to confiscate their printing presses." "Our Thanks to Prince G. Y. Lvov" is printed saying: "They will close down the bourgeoisie's newspapers after openly declaring by law, by government decree, that the capitalists and their defenders are enemies of the people." "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" is printed all the way to its final paragraph, in which Lenin regrets that the working class "has not yet learned to utilise" its power, "for otherwise it would have long ago very politely dispatched such teachers and members of learned societies to countries with a bourgeois 'democracy'" — the sentence that anticipates the deportation of the philosophers six months later. A censoring editor would have cut that. This one did not.
The apparatus is correspondingly thin: no introduction, a Publishers' Note of about 120 words, and roughly thirty notes signed "— Ed." across the whole book. There is nothing here resembling the operation performed by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in 1947, when it hung a 1,429-word footnote quoting Stalin onto Lenin's sentence about the state withering away. Nothing by a later hand is inserted into Lenin's text at all.
(A note in passing, for a running argument in this series. Counting the stem opportunis-, this volume uses it 128 times in 205,562 words — 6.2 per 10,000, against a pooled average of about 1.5 across the Moscow textbooks in this project's corpus, and 1.7 in the Fourth International's own Tenth World Congress documents. That is the second Lenin volume in a row to score four times the rate of the Soviet books published in his name. The argument that high frequency indicates ritual is dead, and Lenin keeps killing it.)
So where is the operation? It is in three places, none of them textual.
The first is the filing. The book has no chronology. It has nine timeless thematic sections — "Traditions of the Democratic and Proletarian Press", "Functions and Tasks of the Revolutionary Press", "Basic Principles of the Revolutionary Press", "Freedom of the Press", "The Bourgeois Press", "The Opportunist Press", "The Revolutionary Workers' and Communist Press", "The Tasks of the Press in Building a Socialist Society", "Principles of Editorial Work. Newspaper Style" — under which a letter to Plekhanov of 1901 about proof corrections and a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of 1917 become two instances of one doctrine. Twenty years of argument in changing circumstances are turned into a set of standing principles. Nothing is cut; the historical index is simply removed from the whole.
The effect is sharpest in Section IV. Appended to it, under the heading "Supplement", are eight government documents: the Decree on the Press, the decree on the Revolutionary Press Tribunal, the draft resolution establishing a commission on the ties between the banks and the newspapers, the decree on the state monopoly of advertising, the decree on the sale of Soviet publications in post offices, the decision founding the Russian Telegraph Agency, and two orders of the Council of People's Commissars. Every one of them falls between the end of October 1917 and the end of January 1918 — some thirteen weeks. They are the emergency measures of a government three months old, and they are printed under the heading "Freedom of the Press" as though they were it.
The second is the grammar of the Index of Periodicals, and this is the finding that will bear weight. The index runs to about 4,000 words and roughly 150 entries; it is a real reference tool, describing each paper Lenin mentions. In the whole of it the phrase "closed down" occurs four times. Twice it names an agent, and both times the agent is somebody else: Pravda "was repeatedly closed down by the tsarist government", and Pravda and Soldatskaya Pravda were "closed down by the Provisional Government". The two Soviet closures the index does record are in the passive voice, and both concern papers of the extreme right — Novoye Vremya, "in October 1917, it was closed down", and Moskovskiye Vedomosti, "closed down after the October Revolution in 1917".
For everything else, there is a terminal date and no verb. Nineteen entries give a Russian title whose run stops in 1917, 1918 or 1919 and offer no reason at all. Among them: "Rech (Speech) — a daily newspaper, central organ of the Cadet Party, published in St. Petersburg in 1906 to 1918"; "Rabochaya Gazeta — central organ of the Mensheviks, published in Petrograd from March to November 1917"; Dyelo Naroda, organ of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, "from 1917 to 1919"; Gorky's Novaya Zhizn, "published in Petrograd between 1917 and 1918"; and "Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word) — a liberal bourgeois daily published in Moscow in 1895–1917". Every one of those five was closed by the Soviet government. The Menshevik central organ's terminal month is the month of the Decree on the Press that this same volume prints eighty pages earlier, and the index does not connect them.
That this is a choice, and not a limitation of the genre, can be shown from the very edition the translations come from. The Collected Works note on Russkoye Slovo — Progress Publishers, Moscow, the source the Publishers' Note credits — reads: "The paper was closed down in November 1917 for carrying slanderous anti-Soviet reports. From January 1918 on, it was published for a period under the titles of Novoye Slovo and Nashe Slovo. It was suppressed altogether in July 1918." The IOJ index says: 1895–1917. Moscow's own scholarly apparatus was more candid than the Prague reference tool built out of it.
**The third is the word censorship.** It occurs twenty-three times in this book. Every single one refers to the tsarist censorship, to the Prussian censorship that suppressed Marx's Rheinische Zeitung, to the German military censorship of 1914–15, or to the Portuguese censorship of 1908. Not one refers to any censorship exercised by a socialist state. Glavlit — the Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing, established in June 1922, which read every printed page in the Soviet Union for the next sixty-eight years and had been doing so for half a century when this book went to press — does not appear.
This is the sharpened form of the test this series has come to rely on. Error is admissible; the category is not. A Soviet volume can concede that a Bolshevik was wrong about a date or a policy — this one prints Lenin conceding that the 1917 advertising decree was "naive and, to a certain extent, mistaken" and that "nothing came of" it. What cannot happen is that the classification turns inward. Censorship is a thing that other states do to us. There is no word in this book for what was being done, in the month it appeared, to the twenty-two hundred.
The single most remarkable page is the Decree on the Press of 27 October (9 November) 1917, printed in full. Its preamble explains that "temporary and extraordinary measures have been taken to stop the flow of filth and slander", and then says this:
As soon as the new order is consolidated, every administrative measure of restriction with regard to the press will be lifted; it will be granted a full freedom within the limits of its responsibility before the courts, in conformity with the broadest and most progressive press laws.
And its third and last article:
The present decree shall operate temporarily and be annulled by a special decree with the advent of normal conditions of social life.
The special decree was never issued. Instead came the Revolutionary Press Tribunal, whose founding decree this volume also prints entire — including its definition of a press crime as "any spreading of false or distorted information about public developments", and its schedule of penalties, which runs from a fine through suspension and "confiscation of printing-houses" to "deprivation of liberty", "banishment of convicted persons from the capital, particular areas, and deportation from the Russian Republic", and "deprivation of guilty persons of some or all political rights". Then Glavlit. Then fifty years.
The volume prints the promise and the instrument, side by side, and says nothing about either. Its own chronological appendix, "Lenin's Journalistic Work. Outstanding Dates" — a substantial piece of work, nearly ten thousand words, which runs from the 1890s to Lenin's death on 21 January 1924 — records the government meeting of 9 November 1917 that "adopts the Decree on the Press" and never returns to it. There is nothing after January 1924 because there is nothing in this book after Lenin. The reader is left holding a temporary decree in a volume published fifty-five years into its operation.
None of which makes the book worthless, and it would be dishonest to leave that impression, because the honesty of the text is itself the reason to reprint it.
This is, simply as a Lenin reader on the press, the fullest thing of its kind in English. Nowhere else are the Iskra letters to Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lunacharsky and Gorky, and the seventy-odd notes to the editors of Pravda, Zvezda, Put Pravdy and Za Pravdu, gathered in one place — letters about proof corrections, about paying contributors, about tone, about the impossibility of running a paper from Cracow when the post takes a week. Section IX, "Principles of Editorial Work. Newspaper Style", is a working editor's book, and a very good one. "The Character of Our Newspapers" (1918) is printed complete, and it is Lenin at his most useful and least doctrinal: "Less politics… More economics", and then "Where is the black list with the names of the lagging factories which since nationalisation have remained models of disorder, disintegration, dirt, hooliganism and parasitism? Nowhere to be found." He goes on to ask how many scoundrels have been pilloried "even among the compositors in Soviet printing works". The paper he wanted was not the paper that resulted, and this volume prints the evidence.
The two appendices are real scholarship. The chronology is a research instrument no reader could easily assemble alone. The Index of Periodicals is a genuinely useful guide to two hundred European and Russian newspapers, and I have criticised it above for what it withholds and not for what it contains, which is accurate. Whoever built these knew the material.
The reply to a book like this was written thirty-six years before it, and it named this exact operation in advance. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), chapter 3, Trotsky notes that the Soviet leaders continue "to publish the works of Lenin (to be sure, with excerpts and distortions by the censor)" while never raising the question of the gulf between Lenin's programme and their state. On the evidence of this volume the charge divides: distortion, no; excerpts, yes, and a great many; suppression of the surrounding history, comprehensively. That is a finer result than the blanket charge, and it is more damaging, because it means the compilers could read Lenin accurately and file him anyway.
Chapter 10, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution", is the direct answer to any volume that prints the phrase "freedom of the press" over Soviet material: the constitutional guarantee, Trotsky writes, means "a continuation of the fierce advance-censorship whose chains are held by the Secretariat of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected", and meanwhile Lenin's own "innumerable articles, speeches, and letters… ending in his 'testament'" remain locked up. And chapter 11 states the alternative that the anti-Stalinist left actually held, which was never the liberal one: not a market in newspapers but a "restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections", assuming "a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks". That is the position against which Lenin's letter to Myasnikov has to be read, and it is not the position Myasnikov held either.
Contemporaneously, the answer was being given in the courts of the city where this book was printed, by people who had read the same Lenin. Petr Uhl and fifteen others went to prison in March 1971 for producing leaflets against the bureaucracy, in a state that would publish, the following year, a section called "Freedom of the Press". Uhl's own defence — that his activity was aimed "not against socialism, society or the working class, but against the bureaucracy and the state apparatus" — is the sentence this volume has no filing category for.
Read it, then, as two things at once. It is an honest and unusually complete edition of Lenin on the press: no sentence rewritten, no opponent misquoted, Trotsky praised where Lenin praised him, the harshest passages printed whole. And it is a book with no memory, published by a journalists' organisation in a city where two thousand two hundred journalists had just been put out of their trade, offering as a section heading the phrase that was the charge against them. The first is why the volume deserves to be back in print. The second is why nobody should read it without knowing where it was made.