The name on the spine of this book — Konstantin Zarodov — was, in 1972, one of the most consequential in the international communist apparatus, though it was almost unknown outside it. Zarodov was editor-in-chief of Problems of Peace and Socialism, the theoretical monthly published in Prague and circulated in English as World Marxist Review — Moscow's central organ for coordinating the world's non-ruling Communist parties. He had been installed in that chair in 1968, the year Warsaw Pact tanks entered the city where his journal was printed. The book betrays his position on almost every page: its statistics are "computed according to... articles and materials published in the journal World Marxist Review"; its author reports conversations "with representatives of the journal, one of whom was the author of this book," with French Communist officials, with Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. This is not a scholar's monograph assembled in a library. It is the considered doctrine of the man Moscow had put in charge of telling the world's Communists what Leninism required of them, written from the city where, four years earlier, a Communist party had tried to give that question a different answer and been stopped by force.
The date is not in doubt and needs no reconstruction. The latest events the book cites are the 24th Congress of the CPSU (spring 1971), the December 1970 crisis in Poland, and the Allende government's first year in Chile; its authorities are Brezhnev's 24th Congress speeches and the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties. The Russian and the English are effectively contemporaneous: this is a 1971 manuscript in a 1972 Progress jacket, and it reads exactly like what it is — the theoretical settlement of accounts after Czechoslovakia, issued at the moment of "normalisation."
What the book is for follows from this. It is not primarily an export primer for a sympathetic Western reader, though Progress sold it as one. It is a charter. Its subject is "the general laws" and "national peculiarities" of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and its purpose is to fix, against all comers, what a Communist party may and may not do with the theory of that transition. The stakes are named in the author's own summary of his method: the whole history of the movement "strikingly demonstrates that in revolutionary activity success attends those who faithfully abide by the theory of Marxism-Leninism... and, conversely, that failure and error are the inevitable lot of those who depart from Marxism-Leninism or pervert it." The book, in other words, is an instrument for distinguishing the faithful from the deviant. Everything turns on where the line is drawn — and the line is drawn at the transition.
Here is the doctrine, stated as precisely as the book states it. There exist "general laws governing all countries taking the road of socialism," and among the laws "operating in the political sphere" the first is "the leadership of the working masses by the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party." The dictatorship of the proletariat is the form of the whole transition period; it is "the chief instrument for carrying out all the tasks of the transition period," and "socialism cannot be built without such a dictatorship." Deviation consists in "overestimation of the peculiarities of the development of individual countries" — in letting national circumstances dilute the general laws, of which the leading role of the party is one. The single most important thing to understand about this book is that the leading role of the party is not presented as a tactical necessity of Russian conditions, nor as a stage to be passed through, but as a general law of socialism as such, binding on every country and every phase of the transition. To question it is, by construction, to depart from Marxism-Leninism.
This is where the book must be read against the text it invokes and does not follow. Lenin's The State and Revolution — written in 1917, weeks before the seizure of power — appears in Zarodov's list of the canonical works "on the transition." But its argument is nowhere developed, because its argument is the opposite of the book's. In The State and Revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the consolidation of an apparatus but its dismantling: the workers, armed and organised in soviets, take administration directly into their own hands; the standing army and the bureaucracy are broken up; and the proletarian state, from its first day, "begins to die away and cannot help dying away." The transition is the process by which the working class, ruling directly, renders the state superfluous. Zarodov's transition is the reverse: the process by which the party, ruling in the workers' name, is made permanent and unchallengeable. The tell is lexical. In roughly 124,000 words, the verb "wither" occurs exactly once — and it is applied not to the state but to capitalism, "which is withering." The withering of the state, the organising thesis of the Leninist text on precisely this subject, has simply been dropped. In its place stands Brezhnev, quoted approvingly: "in one form or another the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., state leadership of the building of socialism by the working class, is inevitable during the entire period of transition." Note the gloss — the dictatorship of the proletariat redefined as "state leadership... by the working class," which is to say, by the party that speaks for it. The self-emancipation of the class has become the administration of the class by the state.
Trotsky drew out this substitution a generation before Zarodov codified it, and the standard against which this book should be read is The Revolution Betrayed (1936). Its third chapter turns The State and Revolution against exactly the operation Zarodov performs. Trotsky quotes Lenin's 1917 formulation — "the proletariat needs only a dying state — that is, a state constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away and cannot help dying away" — and observes that the criticism, once aimed at reformist socialists, "now attacks with redoubled force the Soviet idolators with their cult of a bureaucratic state which has not the slightest intention of 'dying away.'" He recalls that "the state as a bureaucratic apparatus begins to die away the first day of the proletarian dictatorship," and then records the fate of anyone who insisted on it: "when certain incautious Moscow theoreticians attempted... to infer the dying away of the state, the bureaucracy immediately declared such theories 'counterrevolutionary.'" That sentence, written in 1936, predicts this book's method with uncanny economy. For Zarodov does exactly this. He attacks, by name, the "theorists in Czechoslovakia" who had spoken of "the establishment of a socialist state of the whole people" — the notion that the state might begin to lose its coercive, class character — and he files their premature optimism under error. The dictatorship of the proletariat, he insists, continues. The book does not defer the withering of the state to a distant communism; it treats any move toward it, here and now, as a symptom of deviation.
This is why the book is not, in fact, silent about Czechoslovakia — and the silence a reader might expect is not the finding. Czechoslovakia is named more than sixty times; "1968" appears throughout. The Prague Spring is present on almost every theme the book touches, always as the negative example, the thing the general laws exist to forbid. Zarodov quotes Gustáv Husák — installed to run the country after the invasion — at the 24th Congress: "the deviation from fundamental Leninist principles, from the general laws of socialist construction was the cardinal reason for the crisis development and cumulative offensive of the counter-revolutionary forces in Czechoslovakia in 1968." He attacks the Czech reform philosophers individually — Vítězslav Gardavský, whose remark that for Marx "socialism meant the realities and the historical process of the contemporary world" is dismissed as "a glaring falsification of Marxism"; Čestmír Císař; the authors of 50 Years of Socialism. And in the single most revealing passage in the book, he names precisely what the reformers' crime had been. "First an attempt was made to divest the party of its advanced, vanguard role... Another thesis envisaged turning the party into an element of the political system which would include opposition parties." That is the whole indictment. The Prague reformers had proposed to make the ruling party one institution among several, answerable to others — to give the transition, in other words, a democratic content. Against that proposal the entire apparatus of "general laws" is mobilised. The book's doctrine and the tanks are two expressions of one decision.
Apply to it the test this series applies to every such volume: not how often it uses the word "opportunist," but whether the category can ever turn inward. Here the answer is unusually explicit, because Zarodov supplies the criterion himself. On the questions of democracy and dictatorship, he writes, "the answer to these questions is the criterion for determining who is an opportunist and who a Marxist-Leninist. These were the questions that were in the centre of the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968–1969." The category is a boundary marker, and it points in one direction only. Bolsheviks may err — the book concedes mistakes of tempo, of balance between the general and the specific, "as, for example, in Poland and Hungary." But no one who remained inside the apparatus is ever an opportunist. The classification never reaches the CPSU, the party leaderships, or the author. It is reserved for those on the far side of the line: the Czech reformers, the "Left" Trotskyists, the Chinese "splitters," the social democrats. The label tracks which side of the 1968 divide a person stood on, never the content of what they did. That is the finding, and it does not depend on any count.
What the doctrine forbade in theory, the state was enforcing in practice as the book went to press — and here, for once, the reply is exactly contemporaneous. In the same months of 1972 in which Progress issued Leninism and Contemporary Problems of the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, the Fourth International's weekly Intercontinental Press was reporting from "normalised" Czechoslovakia. On 11 September 1972, under the headline "Forty-Six Sentenced in Three Weeks of Trials," Jon Rothschild described how "from July 17 to August 11, the regime headed by Communist party General Secretary Gustav Husak conducted nine witch-hunt trials," sentencing forty-six people — most of them Communists and socialists who had supported the reform — to prison terms of up to six and a half years, in proceedings closed to press and public in violation of Czechoslovak law. The only "illegal" written material the regime could cite, the report noted, was a leaflet distributed before the November 1971 elections "reminding Czechoslovak citizens of their constitutional right not to vote." An earlier issue (22 May 1972) recorded that 2,200 journalists had been dismissed since 1968. This is the "democratic content" of Zarodov's transition, observed from the ground: a party made the general law of socialism, jailing socialists for a leaflet. The doctrine in this book and the sentences in those courtrooms are the same proposition, stated once in the language of theory and once in the language of the penal code.
The same doctrine governs the book's international chapters, where "the general laws" become the constitution of the whole "socialist world system" — the theoretical charter for the states of the socialist camp and, at its edges, for those on the "non-capitalist path." Zarodov devotes an approving passage to the multi-party "national fronts" of the European People's Democracies — the National Front in Czechoslovakia, the Fatherland Front in Bulgaria — and presents them as proof of Communist pluralism: "The experience of this co-operation in the People's Democracies between the Communist and other parties supporting the line of socialist construction completely refutes the slander that the Communists cannot be good partners and do not permit the existence of other parties after they come to power." But the sentence a few lines earlier states the condition on which those parties exist: they "recognise the leading role of the Marxist parties of the working class." The other parties are tolerated exactly insofar as they accept subordination in advance. This is not a refutation of the charge that the Communists forbid genuine opposition; it is a restatement of it in emollient language. And it collapses entirely against the book's own evidence, for the thing the Czech reformers had proposed — a party that was "an element of the political system which would include opposition parties" in the ordinary sense, answerable rather than commanding — is precisely what the National Front was designed to prevent, and what its members were being jailed in 1972 for having wanted.
The book's handling of Trotsky belongs to the same operation and shows the same method — attack a position by describing it wrongly. "Trotsky's theory of 'permanent revolution,'" Zarodov writes, "was also a variety of opportunism. He argued that the peasants were incapable of revolutionary action... and should seize power without delay and in future count solely on the internationalist support of the proletariat of other countries." This is the standard caricature, and it inverts the theory's actual structure. What Trotsky argued was that the completion of the revolution could not be confined within the national arena — that a workers' state in a backward country could begin socialist construction but could not consummate it in isolation. The theses of The Permanent Revolution distinguish the beginning of the revolution on the national stage from its completion on the world stage; the Soviet polemic collapses the two, so that Trotsky is made to say that socialist construction in Russia was impossible and should not be attempted — a claim he never made. The book reaches for Isaac Deutscher as a modern proxy and quotes him accurately (from The Unfinished Revolution, 1968) to the effect that "socialism in one country" expressed "the national narrowness of its authors," then treats the quotation as self-evidently absurd. But the tradition it is caricaturing had already given the constructive answer. In The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch (1938), part of the founding programme of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote that the degeneration of the Soviet state into "a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class" was "the most convincing refutation — not only theoretically, but this time, practically — of the theory of socialism in one country." The prognosis was not that the USSR was not a workers' state but that it was a degenerated one, whose bureaucracy would either be overthrown by the working class or would itself restore capitalism. That the second alternative is what eventually occurred is not a point this introduction needs to press; it is enough to say that the book answers a Trotsky it has invented, and never the one who wrote. The tradition's own mature, constructive reply to the doctrine defended here — that genuine workers' power requires the plurality of parties and tendencies the book forbids — was set out programmatically in the Fourth International's resolution Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Socialist Democracy, drafted by Ernest Mandel and adopted in 1979 and, in revised form, in 1985. It postdates this book and is named here as the tradition's considered answer, not a contemporaneous one; but its target is precisely the doctrine that a single party expresses the unity of a classless society.
None of this means the book is worthless, and to say so would discredit the criticism that precedes it. Where Zarodov expounds Lenin on the transition itself — as distinct from turning Lenin into a warrant for the party-state — the writing is substantial and, on its own terms, honest. His account of the New Economic Policy is a fair one. He presents NEP correctly as a retreat undertaken "with the purpose of strengthening the worker-peasant alliance, which is an indispensable condition for successful socialist construction," describes the replacement of grain requisitioning by the tax in kind, the reopening of the market to the peasant's surplus, the concessions to foreign capital, and Lenin's willingness to use state capitalism because, "with the key positions in the hands of the proletarian state, this revival did not harbour much danger." He is right that Lenin regarded state capitalism as no threat to a working class that held power, and right to root the co-operative plan and the whole NEP in the worker-peasant alliance — the smychka — rather than in coercion. The chapter on the transition period restates Marx's proposition from the Critique of the Gotha Programme accurately, and correctly rebukes those (Zarodov names Rykov) who denied that a transition period exists at all. On the law of uneven development, on the interdependence of the world revolutionary process, on the peasant question as Lenin actually posed it, the book is a competent guide to the doctrine. A reader who wants to know what the Soviet establishment of the early 1970s taught about Lenin and the transition, in its own words and at its most coherent, will find it here set out clearly.
The irony is that this genuine material is exactly what the book's central argument cannot digest. Lenin's NEP was a retreat premised on the self-activity of the working class and its alliance with the peasantry — a wager that socialism could be built by the workers and peasants, gradually, through their own economic institutions, with the state contracting as they grew. Zarodov reports all of this faithfully in Chapter 5 and then, in the same book, makes the permanence and unaccountability of the party the general law of the whole enterprise. The two propositions do not cohere, and the book never reconciles them, because they cannot be reconciled. The living content of Lenin on the transition — the alliance, the gradualism, the co-operatives, the insistence that the state was to be a "dying" state from the first day — pulls against the conclusion the book exists to defend. That tension is the most instructive thing in the volume, and it is present precisely because Zarodov was too able an expositor to suppress the sources entirely.
So the book's honesty is finally in its title. It is Leninism, applied to the contemporary problem of the transition — and on the one question that decides everything, it turns Leninism into its opposite. Where Lenin made the transition the self-emancipation of the working class and the withering of the state, this book makes it the consolidation of the party that rules in the workers' name and the permanence of the state that Lenin said should begin to die on its first day. It was written in Prague, in the shadow of an invasion, by the man Moscow trusted to police the doctrine, in the same season that the courts a mile from his office were sentencing Communists for a leaflet. Read it, as this series recommends its companion volumes be read — V. Chkhikvadze's The Soviet Form of Popular Government and the Machulsky–Topornin Socialism and Democracy, both of which defend the same identification of the party with the class — as the most articulate statement available of what the largest state claiming descent from October taught about the road it had taken, and as a document of the moment that road was closed to any other traffic.