This book carries 1,087 footnote markers across 128,026 words. Eighty-five of them cite Lenin's Collected Works directly, with a further 132 Ibid. references trailing behind them. Marx and Engels are cited twenty-two times. Herbert Marcuse gets page numbers from An Essay on Liberation and One-Dimensional Man; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Stefan Possony, Gustav Wetter, Innocent Bochenski, Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre and the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers Gajo Petrović and Mihailo Marković are all cited by title, place and year. J. Edgar Hoover is cited. A papal encyclical is cited.
Leon Trotsky is not cited once.
He is named, and named as the principal enemy. Trotskyism, the author writes, "with its ultra-revolutionary catchwords, its lack of faith in the strength of the working class, its political adventurism, and neglect for the concrete historical reality, was undoubtedly the most dangerous enemy against which the CPSU had had to fight long and hard." That is a strong claim about a body of writing. Nowhere in the book is a sentence of that writing reproduced. There is no footnote to The Permanent Revolution, none to The Revolution Betrayed, none to Results and Prospects, none to any article, speech or letter. The most dangerous enemy is the only figure in the volume who is never allowed to speak.
That absence is the interpretative key to the whole book, and it is worth being precise about what kind of absence it is. It is not that the author refuses to name living opponents. She names a great many, at some risk to them: Petrović and Marković, three years before they were driven out of the University of Belgrade; Kolakowski, already in exile; Garaudy, expelled from the French party in 1970; Lefebvre, whom she calls "the renegade". These people were alive, contactable, and identifiable, and she quotes them. It is Trotskyism alone that is attacked without a single named adherent and without a single quoted line. The Fourth International — which in 1972 was publishing a weekly in English out of New York, holding world congresses and reporting on Soviet affairs every week — appears in these pages exactly once, and then as the Fourth International Sociological Congress, a gathering of academic sociologists. The organisation is not mentioned at all.
Progress Publishers titles were commissioned, and this one can be traced to its office. Yelena Dmitrievna Modrzhinskaya (1910–1982) headed the sector for the criticism of anti-communism at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1953 until her death; she took her doctorate in philosophy in 1964 and was named an Honoured Scientist of the RSFSR in 1970. This book is that sector's flagship product, and the book itself half-says so: it cites the international theoretical conference on "The Growing Role of Leninism in the Modern Epoch and the Criticism of Anti-Communism", held in Moscow from 19 to 23 January 1970, and names two of its speakers, V. Okulov and L. N. Velikovich, as colleagues working the same seam.
Her earlier career explains the book's method better than her academic one does. Modrzhinskaya was a foreign intelligence officer. A graduate of the international law department of Moscow State University, she rose to major of state security, ran the referral department under Beria, was stationed in Warsaw in 1940–41 under the codename "Maria", and after the 1941 reorganisation was given the English sector of the NKGB's analytical directorate by Pavel Fitin. In that post she wrote the report — dated April 1943 in Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev's TRIPLEX: Secrets from the Cambridge Spies (Yale University Press, 2009), where it is printed — arguing that Philby, Burgess, Blunt and their circle were producing too much good material to be genuine, and were therefore British double agents. She was wrong, and she was promoted.
Read with that in view, Leninism and the Battle of Ideas stops being a bad philosophy book and becomes a rather good target study. Its organising question is not whether an argument is true but who is paying for it, through what institution, and to what end. Chapter Three, the longest sustained stretch in the volume at some 18,500 words, is an inventory of the Western apparatus: the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford, where she notes that "The Institute's 'advisory committee' includes executives from giant corporations like the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Republic Steel Corporation, T. Mellon and Sons, and others, whose contributions make up almost 70 per cent of the Institute's budget"; the Center for Strategic Studies in Georgetown; Columbia's Research Institute on Communist Affairs and its Russian Institute; the West German Ostforschung network, institute by institute, from the East European Institute at the Free University in West Berlin to the Federal Institute for the Study of Marxism-Leninism in Cologne. She puts a figure on it — "The cost of ideological struggle and anti-communist propaganda comes to over $500 million a year" — and names the agencies: "The State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the Peace Corps, the United States Information Agency and many other outfits are engaged in organising anti-communist political and ideological acts."
This is the part of the book that deserves to be taken seriously, and it should be conceded plainly. A great deal of Cold War Sovietology was commissioned and paid for exactly as she says, by foundations and corporations with a direct interest in the conclusions, and it produced a great deal of dishonest scholarship. Her chapter on neocolonialism is better still: the oil extraction figures she gives for the Middle East (15.7 million tons in 1937, 468.3 million in 1966) and her reading of David Shepard of Standard Oil telling a Columbia audience that rising living standards in poor countries were excellent ground for private enterprise are the work of someone who has actually read the trade literature. She quotes Arnold Toynbee's 1966 cable to a Montreal anti-war meeting, and Bertrand Russell on American world ambitions, and she does not flatten them: she notes that such critics "frequently stop short of going to its social roots." On racism, on the Vietnam war, on the poverty statistics that Kennedy and Johnson themselves conceded, she is landing real blows on real targets, and she knows where the targets are because finding them had been her job.
The irony sits in a footnote. In her chapter on convergence theory she sources an argument to Encounter, 1963, no. 6, without comment. By 1972 it had been public for five years — since the Ramparts disclosures of 1967 and the resignations that followed — that Encounter was funded through the Congress for Cultural Freedom with CIA money. The one journal in her bibliography that was demonstrably an intelligence operation is the one she cites as an ordinary source. A book whose whole claim to authority is that it can follow the money did not follow it.
Unusually for this series, the date on the spine is close to the date of the text. The copyright page reads only "First printing 1972", with the Russian original title legible under the scanning damage as Ленинизм и современная борьба идей — literally, Leninism and the Contemporary Struggle of Ideas. The latest datable material is the Report of the Central Committee to the 24th Congress of the CPSU (Moscow, 1971), the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (May 1971), and an issue of Problems of Peace and Socialism from 1971; the evidential spine of the argument is the cluster of speeches given at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on 21–22 April 1970 for the Lenin centenary. The Russian text was therefore finished in 1971 and translated at once by Yuri Sdobnikov. There is no earlier edition hiding behind this one. It is a book of the 24th Congress, written to the 24th Congress's specifications.
That matters, because the 24th Congress is precisely where the record shows the line hardening. Intercontinental Press reported in its issue of 1 February 1971 that Soviet officials expected the coming congress to rescind the Twentieth Congress's denunciation of Stalin outright; its year-end review of 25 December 1972 concluded that "In 1971 the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Soviet Communist party ratified a decision to reverse the partial easing of controls that had been granted in the years following Stalin's death."
The word Stalin occurs twice in 128,026 words. Both times it is a commendation.
Upon Lenin's death, Trotsky started ideological subversion in an effort to supplant Leninism with Trotskyism. The Party and its Central Committee, headed by J. V. Stalin, safeguarded Leninism and, in face of tremendous difficulties, ensured the victory of socialism in the Soviet Republic. Without the long and energetic struggle of the Party under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin, against the Right-wing deviationists and Trotskyites, it would have been impossible to win in the Great October Socialist Revolution, to consolidate this victory, to build socialism and to safeguard it during the Great Patriotic War.
Read the last sentence again. It makes the struggle against "Trotskyites" a precondition of winning in October 1917 — an event at which Trotsky was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Military Revolutionary Committee that organised the insurrection, and at which the factional divisions of 1923–27 did not yet exist. This is the amalgam in its purest form, and Trotsky had already dismantled the machinery that produced it. In The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), replying to the invention of a "practical centre" for the insurrection from which he had supposedly been excluded, he pointed out that Stalin, "with the help of the Yaroslavskys", had built a legend on a committee "of which, if you please, Trotsky was not a member. Neither was Lenin a member of that committee."
The Twentieth Congress of 1956 is not mentioned. The phrases "cult of the individual" and "personality cult" do not occur. Neither do the Moscow Trials, the Terror, or the year 1937 in any sense other than an oil production statistic. The single admission anywhere in the book that anything went wrong in a socialist country is not the author's own: it sits inside a quotation from János Kádár about Hungary in 1956, referring to "the now well-known mistakes that really occurred", which are not specified and which the surrounding sentences subordinate to a "bloody counter-revolutionary putsch". A book published in Moscow in 1972 that rehabilitates Stalin in two clauses and never once concedes an execution is not an accident of emphasis. It is the 24th Congress line, delivered by the sector responsible for delivering it.
The house method for this series is to take an attribution and go to the source. Modrzhinskaya makes four checkable claims about Trotsky. Every one of them can be tested against books she does not cite.
First: "Trotsky said the success of the revolution in Russia depended on whether or not it would be supported by a simultaneous uprising of the European proletariat." Trotsky's own summary, in the concluding theses of The Permanent Revolution (1930), says the opposite about simultaneity: "The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena." The claim is not that the revolutions must be simultaneous but that a national revolution cannot be completed alone.
Second: he "erected a dogmatic antithesis between Lenin's conclusion that the proletariat could initially win out in a few countries or even in one individual country". The same theses state: "Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they will come later than the latter to socialism." Trotsky affirms the very proposition he is said to deny. The dispute was over the completion of socialism in one country, not over which country could take power first — and by collapsing the two, the charge disposes of an argument that was never made.
Third: he "did not believe in the possibility of an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, and advocated a harmful policy in respect of the peasantry". Point three of the same theses: "Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed."
Fourth, and this one is almost comic in its precision: Trotskyism is defined, in the chapter on Maoism, as a set of "Trotskyite conceptions (the stake on artificially whipping up history, executing leaps and permanent revolution)". Chapter two of The Permanent Revolution is titled "The Permanent Revolution is Not a 'Leap' by the Proletariat, but the Reconstruction of the Nation under Leadership of the Proletariat", and states in the text: "The permanent revolution is no isolated leap of the proletariat; rather it is the rebuilding of the whole nation under the leadership of the proletariat."
Four attributions, four refutations available in a single short book, long in print in English and in Modrzhinskaya's four working languages besides Russian. The point is not that Modrzhinskaya was lazy. It is that the genre does not require the check, because in this genre a characterisation is not a description of a position but an assignment to a category — and the categories are what the book is really made of.
The vocabulary bears this out. The stem opportunis- occurs 103 times, just under eight per ten thousand words, against a corpus average of about 1.5 across the 195 Progress volumes in this project — among the highest rates recorded. And the sorting is asymmetrical in the way the corpus predicts. "Right" opportunism and "Right" revisionism are written plainly, twenty-nine and twenty times respectively. Their left-hand counterparts appear five and eight times, and the word "Left" carries scare quotes on all thirty of its occurrences in this construction, while "Right" never does. The typography does the argument: a right deviation is a deviation of the left, whereas a "left" deviation is not really of the left at all. From there it is a short step to the book's use of Trotskyism as a solvent — Maoism, we are told, "has adopted ideas which are akin to Trotskyism", and the Chinese party is "being built as Maoist-Trotskyite, anti-Leninist"; petty-bourgeois nationalism "as a rule it links up with Right-opportunist revisionism and Trotskyism"; and West German Social Democrats promoting "the ideas of Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer, Leon Trotsky and similar other men" are doing anti-communist work. Trotskyism has become a property that can be attributed to Peking, to Bonn and to Belgrade at once. A term that explains everything explains nothing, which is why it needs no citation.
The book's subject is ideological subversion inside the socialist countries. It devotes fifty-six references to Czechoslovakia, quoting Brezhnev at length on the August 1968 invasion — "It was an attempt to strike in this way at the positions of socialism in Europe as a whole" — and reprinting the post-invasion Czechoslovak Central Committee document "The Lessons of the Crisis Development", which calls the entry of five armies "an act of international solidarity". Alexander Dubček is not named. Neither is Ota Šik, nor any other Czechoslovak reformer. Sixty-four references to a country, and no Czechoslovak protagonist.
The deeper silence is domestic. In a book about how imperialism smuggles hostile ideas into Soviet society, published in Moscow in 1972, the following words do not occur: samizdat, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Medvedev, Grigorenko, dissident. All of them were available to her. Solzhenitsyn had taken the Nobel Prize in 1970. Sakharov's Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom had circulated worldwide from 1968. These are absences of the kind that count: the author had the facts, had every professional reason to use them, and left them out — because to describe the opposition would have been to concede that it had arguments.
What makes this precisely datable rather than merely notable is what was happening in the same months. Vladimir Bukovsky was tried in Moscow on 5 January 1972 and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment and five years' exile, largely for having sent abroad the psychiatric records documenting the confinement of dissenters in special hospitals. Between 24 April and 26 June 1972, while Modrzhinskaya's book was going through the press at 21 Zubovsky Boulevard, Intercontinental Press — the weekly of the movement she was assigned to refute — serialised the full transcript of that trial across ten issues, having already printed the appeal to UN Secretary-General Waldheim signed by fifty-two Soviet citizens, with all fifty-two names. The appeal's own words: "The groundless and inhuman conviction of Vladimir Bukovsky compels us to appeal to you."
The strongest single demonstration that this book's method was a choice rather than a necessity is Marcuse. Modrzhinskaya's charge is that he is "a typical example of this brand of bourgeois anti-communist ideologist", fulfilling "the monopolies' 'social order'", and that he "says that it is meaningless to look for any specific historical agents of revolutionary change in the advanced capitalist countries."
The underlying observation is correct, and it was not hers alone. Four years earlier, in the International Socialist Review of November–December 1968 — the theoretical journal of the American Socialist Workers Party, on the Fourth International's side of the 1940 split — Robert Langston published a long study making the same central criticism: that Marcuse had come to doubt the working class as the agent of transformation, and that in doing so he "departs from the method of historical materialism." But Langston reached it by quoting One-Dimensional Man at length, by tracing Marcuse's route from Heidegger through the 1932 essay on the Paris Manuscripts, and by granting what was true — that Reason and Revolution (1941) is "possibly the best book on Hegel yet written in English", and that "Marcuse shares with Marxists the conviction that the only potentially, ultimately world-transforming agency in the modern world is the working class." Same diagnosis; opposite intellectual operation. One engages a thinker and disagrees with him. The other classifies him and stops.
On Czechoslovakia, the answer was also in print and also from the left. The Ninth World Congress of the Fourth International, whose documents the ISR carried in May–June 1969, recorded that "In Czechoslovakia the student movement played a central role in initiating the struggle for socialist democracy during the spring and summer of 1968", and listed "the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam war, and finally the invasion of Czechoslovakia" among the causes of "the disintegration of Stalinist monolithism". (The transcription reads "Sine-Soviet"; the word is Sino.) That is a judgement Modrzhinskaya's readers were not permitted to see, and it was made not by the CIA but by an organisation that supported the Vietnamese revolution as unambiguously as she did.
And on the accusation she treats as self-evidently a slander — Marcuse's talk of the Soviet Union's "repressive bureaucracy" — the reply is older than the Cold War. The Revolution Betrayed (1936) described the Soviet bureaucracy as having "risen above a class which is hardly emerging from destitution and darkness", and concluded that "It is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." That analysis may be right or wrong. It cannot be answered by being called imperialist propaganda, because it was written by a man the imperialists were quite happy to see murdered.
Read for its philosophy, this is a weak volume: the chapters on the "crisis of bourgeois ideology" and the falsifiers of Marxism-Leninism restate a syllabus. Read as an institutional document, it is valuable and should be kept in print. It is the fullest English-language statement of what the Academy of Sciences' anti-anti-communism sector believed its job to be in the year after the 24th Congress, written by the officer who ran that sector for twenty-nine years and who had learned her trade deciding which foreign informants were lying. Chapter Three remains a usable inventory of Cold War institutional funding, and a reader who wants to know how the Soviet state mapped its ideological adversaries in 1971 will not find a better single source.
But the map has a blank on it, and the blank is the shape of this series. Modrzhinskaya could name and quote a Yugoslav philosopher, a French Catholic, an American FBI director and a pope. She could not name one member of the Fourth International, or reproduce one sentence written by the man she called the most dangerous enemy the Party ever faced. The analyst who once concluded that intelligence too good to be true must be false had, by 1972, arrived at a method in which no evidence needed to be examined at all — because the category was settled in advance, and the category was the finding.