This is not a Soviet textbook. It is a box of primary sources, and that distinction governs everything that follows. On Historical Materialism: A Collection, compiled by T. Borodulina and issued by Progress Publishers in 1972, gathers under one cover the founding texts of the materialist conception of history — Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, long passages from The German Ideology, Engels's late letters on historical materialism, the whole of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and much of Ludwig Feuerbach, and then, filling the second and larger half of the book, Lenin. The translations are lifted straight from Progress's own Selected Works of Marx and Engels and the 45-volume Collected Works of Lenin. There is nothing here to refute, because almost nothing here was written in Moscow in 1972. What was made in Moscow in 1972 is the container: the selection, the order, the notes at the back, the name index. That container is the proper object of a critical introduction, and it turns out to be a more revealing object than one might expect — because the texts it holds are, again and again, an argument against the frame it puts around them.
A word on the date, because it means something different here than in most volumes of this kind. The texts range from the 1840s to the early 1920s; the thing made in 1972 is the compilation and its apparatus. And 1972 was a particular moment for Soviet ideological publishing. It was the year of détente, of the first strategic-arms treaty with Washington, and the fourth year after Warsaw Pact tanks had ended the Prague Spring — a season in which the Soviet academy liked to present itself abroad not as a party of upheaval but as the sober custodian of a classical heritage. Progress's English-language anthologies of the founders were export objects and teaching objects at once, assembled out of the standing Selected Works and Collected Works, fitted with editorial notes and a name index, and made to carry the outward furniture of a scholarly edition. The commission behind this book is therefore not the loud one of the doctrinal textbooks, which argue a case; it is the quieter work of curating a canon — deciding which of the classics' own words the student meets, in what sequence, and with what marginalia at the foot of the page. That quietness is exactly what makes the choices worth reading closely. No thesis is stated in the front matter, so the thesis has to be inferred from what was gathered and what was written around it.
Take the material first, on its own terms, because it deserves that. The 1859 Preface is one of the few pages in the history of social thought that can honestly be called foundational. In a paragraph Marx compresses a whole method: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." The productive forces develop; the relations of production that once fostered them turn into "their fetters"; "then begins an epoch of social revolution." Read cold, it is still startling — the claim that the way a society reproduces its material life sets the terms on which its members can think at all. The German Ideology, drafted more than a decade earlier and unpublished in Marx's lifetime, states the corollary that has never lost its edge: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." And Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels's most widely read pamphlet, does the work of turning a philosophical insight into a research programme, locating "the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions ... not in men's brains, not in men's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange." A reader who came to this book knowing none of it would come away with the real thing, in the authors' own words. The compiler earns that much credit at once.
She earns more, and here the volume's quiet integrity begins to show. The decisive question one brings to any historical-materialism reader assembled under Soviet auspices is whether it presents the method as Marx and Engels actually left it — open, provisional, self-correcting — or as the closed mechanism that Stalin's 1938 essay Dialectical and Historical Materialism had frozen it into: society climbing a fixed staircase of five formations, each nation mounting the same steps in the same order, the economic "base" grinding out its "superstructure" like a mill. The test is not abstract. It can be run against the printed page, and the outcome is not what a reader schooled to expect the worst of Progress Publishers would predict.
Run it first on the letters. Engels spent the last five years of his life writing, to correspondents who had misunderstood him, a series of warnings against exactly the mechanical caricature that would later be sold as orthodoxy. All the central ones are here, printed in full and not buried: to Bloch, to Schmidt, to Mehring, to Borgius. The letter to Bloch of September 1890 is the heart of it, and Borodulina prints the passage that matters most:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.
The superstructure — political forms, law, "even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants" — reacts back on the base; "there is an interaction of all these elements." And then the admission that no catechism could contain, kept intact in this edition: "Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it." Engels goes on to name the disease directly — the young "Marxists" who think they can apply the theory "without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles" — and to pronounce that "the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too." To the letter to Borgius (correctly attributed here to Borgius, not to Starkenburg under whose name it circulated for decades — a sign the textual scholarship in this book is competent when nothing political is at stake) Engels adds the case against economic determinism at the level of persons: great men are necessary but interchangeable, and "the man was always found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc." This is the anti-mechanical Engels in full voice, and the 1972 volume gives him that voice without a muffler.
The letter to Mehring of July 1893 completes the sequence and is, if anything, the subtlest of the four. There Engels gives the classic short account of ideology, and it is the reverse of a crude reflex theory: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process." The thinker, not knowing his real motives, "imagines false or seeming motive forces" and takes his material from the stock of inherited thought. This is an argument about why ideas acquire an apparent life of their own — why the historian must reconstruct the material sources that the thinker himself cannot see — and it is the opposite of the notion that consciousness is a passive readout of the economy. That Borodulina printed it in full, next to the Bloch letter's insistence on "an interaction of all these elements," means the volume genuinely arms its reader against the mechanical reading. The founders' own correspondence, gathered here, is a running warning against the thing their names would later be made to license.
Now run the test on the single sentence where Soviet editing most often showed its hand. The 1859 Preface, listing the "progressive epochs in the economic formation of society," names four: "In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society." The Asiatic mode of production is the sentence that the five-formations schema could not digest — a mode that fitted no rung of the universal ladder, that implied history need not run everywhere through the same stations, and that Stalin's 1938 codification simply legislated out of existence. A collection loyal to the catechism over the classics would have found ways around it. This one does not. The sentence stands, unabridged, in the Preface as printed — and it stands a second time inside Lenin's Karl Marx, where Lenin quotes the same passage in full, Asiatic mode and all, and a third time where it is quoted again later in the volume. Three times the offending word survives. Whatever else can be said about the frame around these texts, the texts were not gutted to fit it.
The point can be pressed one turn further, because Lenin himself, in this very book, supplies the sharpest weapon against the use to which his name would be put. The collection includes his short 1910 piece Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism and his Marxism and Revisionism, and in them Lenin says, of the people who would later be his official interpreters, everything a critic of the catechism could wish. "It is precisely because Marxism is not a lifeless dogma, not a completed, ready-made, immutable doctrine, but a living guide to action," he writes, that it registers every abrupt change in social life. His contempt is reserved for those who "had learnt by rote certain 'slogans', certain answers to tactical questions, without having understood the Marxist criteria for these answers," and for the revisionists who, following the professors, replaced "'artful' (and revolutionary) dialectics by 'simple' (and tranquil) 'evolution'." Read in 1972, in a state whose universities taught historical materialism from numbered study-questions and examined it by rote, those lines are not a period piece. They are a description of the reader's own surroundings, printed by the state that produced them.
So the criticism of this volume cannot be the usual one. It is not that the texts were falsified; on the evidence of the page, they were not. The criticism has to fall precisely where the brief for such a book always warned it might — on the apparatus, the part Moscow actually wrote in 1972 — and there it lands hard, because the apparatus argues against its own contents.
Begin with the shape of the book, which is itself a thesis. Historical materialism was founded by Marx and Engels; Lenin was its greatest twentieth-century practitioner but added no new first principle to it. Yet in this collection Lenin's half runs longer than Marx's and Engels's combined, and it is weighted, heavily, toward the texts of state and power rather than the texts of method: long extracts from The State and Revolution, from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, from the writings on self-determination, on imperialism and the split in socialism, on the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the tasks of the Soviet government. These are major works, and several bear directly on historical materialism. But the cumulative effect of the selection is to bend a book about a method of historical explanation toward a book about the legitimacy of a particular state — to make the theory of how societies change culminate, as if by the logic of the subject itself, in the institutions of 1918. The compiler's own framing sentence gives the game its vocabulary: her aim, she writes, was "to collect the most important writings of the classics of Marxism-Leninism on questions of historical materialism." Marxism-Leninism is not a term Marx or Engels or Lenin could have used of themselves; it is the name of the fusion, minted after Lenin's death, that the arrangement of this book is built to naturalise.
Then the notes and the name index, where the real editorial voice — the 1972 voice — speaks plainly, and where the open method of the texts meets the closed politics of the frame. In three hundred thousand words of Marx, Engels and Lenin, the name Trotsky appears exactly once, and not in a classic text: it appears in an editorial note, attached to a Lenin passage, informing the reader that "permanent revolution" is "Trotsky's theory ... a revolution without the peasantry, which was counterposed to Lenin's theory." This is the standard Soviet falsification, and it should be corrected in plain terms, because the note states as settled fact a thing that is not true. Trotsky's actual theory, argued in Results and Prospects (1906) and restated in The Permanent Revolution (1930), did not dispense with the peasantry; it held that in a backward country the proletariat would come to power at the head of the peasant masses, precisely because the weak native bourgeoisie could not carry through its own revolution — and that having taken power it could not stop at bourgeois tasks. Whatever one makes of that argument, "a revolution without the peasantry" is not a summary of it but a slogan against it, and the single appearance of Trotsky's name in this entire volume is a slogan supplied by the editors and dressed as information.
The name index does quieter work of the same kind. Its purpose is to identify the people the texts mention, and for most of them it does so serviceably. But turn to the Left Oppositionists — the men who fought these very questions out with Lenin and were destroyed for losing — and the entries thin into euphemism. Pyatakov is present in the texts because Lenin polemicised against his position on self-determination; the index dates him "(1890–1937)" and then narrates his life to its edge and no further: he "was reinstated, and in 1936 expelled again for his anti-Party activity." Radek, "(1885–1939)," is "expelled again in 1936." The bracketed death-years are exact, and in both cases they are the years of the thing the entry declines to name: Pyatakov was shot in January 1937 after the second Moscow trial; Radek, sentenced at the same trial, died in a labour camp in 1939. The index prints the date of the execution and suppresses the fact of it. This is the apparatus at its most characteristic — not lying about the record so much as arranging its silences, so that the men who worked at the foundations of historical materialism appear in the book only as negative space, defined entirely by the Party they were expelled from and never by the deaths the state gave them.
Set the two halves side by side and the volume divides against itself. The letter to Bloch, printed here, says that anyone who reduces history to the economic factor "transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase." The note on permanent revolution, printed here, reduces a rival theory to a phrase in order to dismiss it. Lenin, printed here, mocks those who learn "slogans" by rote without the criteria behind them; the name index feeds the reader slogans — "anti-Party activity" — in place of criteria. The texts model an open, self-critical method; the frame enacts a closed one. A careful reader does not need an outside authority to see the contradiction. It is legible within the covers, between the body of the book and its back matter.
What the frame cannot admit — and what the twentieth century, including the Soviet century, actually demonstrated — is the thing the frozen schema was built to exclude: that history does not run everywhere through the same stations in the same order. This is not a heresy imported from outside Marxism; it is Marxism used rather than recited, and its fullest statement comes from the man the apparatus reduces to a slogan. Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development, worked out in the opening chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution (1932), takes the 1859 Preface's "progressive epochs" and refuses to read them as a staircase every nation must climb tread by tread. Backward countries, forced into contact with advanced ones, do not repeat the sequence; they telescope it, adopting the latest results before passing through the intervening stages. "To jump over intermediate stages," Trotsky wrote, "is the way of backward countries." In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) he states the principle in a sentence: "The law of uneven development is supplemented throughout the whole course of history by the law of combined development." That is historical materialism doing what the 1859 Preface asked of it — explaining a real transformation, in this case the improbable one that put a socialist revolution first in the least industrial of the great powers — rather than sorting societies into predetermined bins. The Stalinist five-formations catechism, by contrast, took the same Preface and made it a machine for producing the answer already known. The Asiatic mode had to go from that machine because it was a mode that would not fit the bins; it is a small, sharp irony that the 1972 compiler let the word back onto the page while the schema built on its suppression still governed the classrooms the book was printed for.
It is worth being clear about why the schema was frozen in the first place, because the freezing was not mere academic dullness. A method that is open — that admits interaction, accident, the relative weight of politics and ideas, the possibility that history skips stages — is a method whose conclusions cannot be known in advance. A closed law of five inevitable formations, by contrast, delivers its verdict before the evidence is in: socialism is the next rung, the state that stands on it is history's own product, and to oppose that state is to oppose the laws of development themselves. The anti-Stalinist tradition made this point at the moment the schema was hardening. Trotsky's argument in The Revolution Betrayed is that the Soviet bureaucracy, having won its independence from the working class, needed a theory that presented its own rule as necessity rather than as one contested outcome among others — and a historical materialism reduced to an escalator of stages was precisely such a theory. The same closure that struck the Asiatic mode from the schema and reduced Pyatakov and Radek to expulsion dates is at work here: a doctrine that cannot be turned back on the state that teaches it, cannot register the state's own contradictions, and cannot name what became of the men who insisted it should. The open method in these pages could do all three. That is the measure of what the frame took away.
None of this is reason to leave the volume on the shelf — the opposite. It remains one of the most useful single-volume gatherings of the primary texts of historical materialism in English, drawn from competent translations, and for the Engels letters alone it earns its place; nowhere else are the anti-mechanical warnings to Bloch, Schmidt, Mehring and Borgius so conveniently assembled. Read the texts and trust them. Read the notes and the name index as a second document bound in with the first — a record, precise in its own way, of what a mature Soviet institution in 1972 wanted the method to become, and of the distance between that wish and the open, unfinished thing Marx and Engels actually built. The best short guide to that distance is not hidden in the archives; it is on page 447 of this very book, in Lenin's own words, warning against turning a living guide to action into "something one-sided, distorted and lifeless." The apparatus around him did exactly that. The texts he sits among are the standing refutation of it.