The Fourth International, Mikhail Basmanov tells his reader on the book's first working page, was founded by people who "did not represent anyone except themselves." "It came about on a September day in 1938, when a score or so of people met in a small smoke-filled room in a Paris suburb." He is not wrong about the numbers or the place. Roughly twenty delegates did meet, for a single day, in a house at Périgny outside Paris. He is also right that the communiqué afterwards said Lausanne. What he offers as evidence of furtiveness — "the 'founders' of the 'Fourth International' were rather secretive about their affairs" — was in fact a security measure, and the reason for it is the first thing this book leaves out. The man who organised that conference, Rudolf Klement, had been abducted from his Paris flat in July 1938, some seven weeks earlier; a headless body recovered from the Seine was identified as his. Trotsky's son Leon Sedov had died in a Paris clinic in February under circumstances his father never accepted as natural. Ignace Reiss, who had broken with Stalin's intelligence service the year before, had been shot dead on a road near Lausanne in September 1937. Twenty people met in a private house and lied about the city because the people who organised their previous meetings were being killed.
None of this appears in Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, and it is worth establishing at the outset how comprehensive the omission is. Across roughly 24,000 words of Soviet history of the struggle against Trotskyism, the name Stalin does not occur once. Not in criticism, not in praise, not in passing. Nor do Klement, Sedov, Reiss, Barcelona, Budapest, Hungary or Czechoslovakia — and these are absences in the book, not artefacts of a bad scan; the misspellings under which a name can hide have been checked, and there is nothing under any of them. The agent of the 1920s is "the Communist Party," "the Communists," occasionally "the Party leadership," and Lenin, who is quoted throughout as though he had lived to conduct the expulsions himself. Trotsky's death is not mentioned; nor the Moscow trials; nor forced collectivisation; nor the famine of 1932–33; nor Hungary in 1956; nor Czechoslovakia in 1968 — this last in a book addressed to the generation whose politics were made in 1968. The word "purge" does not appear. The Nazi–Soviet Pact does not appear. When Basmanov reaches the fate of the Left Opposition he writes a single sentence: "Trotskyite views were deemed incompatible with Party membership." Every one of the dozens of leaders expelled by the Fifteenth Congress in December 1927 who did not recant was exiled or imprisoned, and the great majority of them were shot between 1936 and 1938. The book's term for all of it is "deemed incompatible."
That silence is the book. Everything else follows from the need to maintain it.
About the author, the volume says nothing at all beyond the Russian signature on the last page. But Basmanov was not anonymous to the people he was attacking. He had been publishing in this field since at least 1967, when an article of his, "Trotskyism in the Service of Anti-Communism," came out of the Academy of Social Sciences of the CPSU Central Committee. The Fourth International's own weekly, then called World Outlook, translated it in full with critical notes on 22 March 1968, and described it as having been "prepared during 1967 by no less an institution than the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and put out under the signature of one M. Basmanov" — the order of authorship there is the editors' point, and it is a fair one. A second piece, "On Contemporary Trotskyism and Its Subversive Activities," ran in Kommunist No. 7 of 1969, the theoretical organ of the Soviet party's Central Committee; the American Communist Party reprinted it in Political Affairs under a title of its own invention, and Intercontinental Press translated it again from the Russian, with a reply, on 27 April 1970. He was, in the phrase used there, one of the Kremlin's leading "Trotskyologists"; two years later the same weekly listed him first among the "obscure apparatus-propagandists" whose decade of work the Central Committee was about to upgrade. His own footnote here points the reader to a companion title, S. Dimitriev and V. Ivanov's Historical Lessons of Lenin's Struggle Against Trotskyism, "the same series." This is commissioned work in a commissioned series.
The commission is datable. Brezhnev's report to the Twenty-Fourth Congress in March 1971 named Trotskyism, in passing, as a danger. In Kommunist No. 18 for 1971, Boris Ponomarev, a secretary of the Central Committee, published a twenty-one-page article whose running subtitle was "Trotskyism — Weapon of Anti-Communism," and closed it with five explicit instructions to "our theoretical and propagandist cadres": lay bare the anti-Leninist essence of Trotskyism, and its "kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions"; show its hostility to the working class by concrete examples; expose its false revolutionism and its disbelief in building socialism in single countries; show that it attacks the socialist countries rather than imperialism; and defend peaceful coexistence against the charge that it is class collaboration. Read the chapter headings of this book against that list and they match, in order. Basmanov is executing a directive, and the directive itself was a response to something real: after 1968 the sections of the Fourth International were recruiting students in France, Belgium, Japan, Britain and the United States, out of the same pool the pro-Moscow parties depended on. Basmanov says so. His chapter "Banking on Ignorance" is an anxious catalogue of the fact.
Because the argument must reach 1973 without passing through the 1930s, it has to be built out of substitutions, and they are visible. Take the war. Basmanov's third question to Pierre Frank — whose short history of the Fourth International, published in Paris in 1969, is the book's principal target — concerns the pre-war years, and he presses hard: "When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the Trotskyites declared that the war continued to be an imperialist war and that the Soviet Union should not be given support." The second half of that is false: defence of the USSR against imperialist attack was a founding position of the Fourth International and remained one. But set that aside, because the first half describes a line that was indeed held between September 1939 and June 1941 — and it was held by the Communist International. From the signing of the Pact until the invasion, the Comintern's parties characterised the war as an imperialist war on both sides, dropped the anti-fascist front they had built since 1935, and in France sought permission to publish L'Humanité legally under German occupation. Basmanov's charge is a description of his own organisation's policy in those months, redirected. He can make it only because the Pact is absent from his book.
Or take Spain. "During the civil war in Spain, the Trotskyites tried to break up the Popular Front and spread defeatist attitudes" — and that is all Spain gets. The POUM is not named. Andreu Nin, its leader, arrested in June 1937 and killed in Soviet hands outside Madrid, is not named. The Barcelona May Days are not named. There is a genuine complication here that an honest account would want, and it cuts across factional lines: the POUM was not the Spanish section of Trotsky's movement, and Trotsky attacked Nin severely for having signed the Popular Front pact at all. Basmanov could have used that. He does not, because using it would require saying what happened to Nin.
There is a simple test that can be run on a book like this. Basmanov names Trotsky 423 times in 24,000 words. He cites no work by Trotsky at all. The opening chapter, which carries the whole historical case, puts eleven separate passages inside quotation marks and attributes them to Trotsky or to "the Trotskyites"; it carries four references, and they are to Lenin's Collected Works, to the companion Soviet volume by Dimitriev and Ivanov, to William Z. Foster of the American Communist Party, and to a Moscow documentary collection of Comintern resolutions. Where a source is given for a Trotsky quotation anywhere in the book, it is a Communist Party newspaper: the line "No devil ever cut off his own claws," dated 1936, is footnoted to Unsere Zeit, the West German party's daily, for 29 January 1970. An opponent who is cited can be checked. An opponent who is only characterised cannot — and that is the practical function of the arrangement, whatever the intention behind it.
Checked against the texts, the attributions come apart in a particular way. Basmanov quotes a programmatic statement from "a letter addressed in 1928 to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern." The Fourth Congress met in 1922; the 1928 document is The Third International After Lenin, Trotsky's criticism of the draft programme submitted to the Sixth Congress, and its opening chapter reads: "not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country." The qualification "solely or mainly" is what the sentence is about, and it is gone from Basmanov's version. Trotsky's very next sentence applies the rule to the Soviet party itself; the target is socialism in one country, not the existence of national programmes. Basmanov offers the sentence as proof that Trotsky "deprived individual national contingents of the working class of any concrete programme of action," which is a strange charge to rest on the first page of a document that is itself a proposed programme. A few lines earlier he has Trotsky writing in 1906 that "it is hopeless to think that a revolutionary Russia could stand up in face of a conservative Europe." Trotsky wrote it in August 1917 — he said so from the platform in November 1926, "This I wrote in August, 1917, and I believe that it was perfectly right" — and he wrote it as the second half of a conditional whose first half has been removed, and paired with a clause about Germany that has also been removed: "And if this [the development of the revolution in other countries] were not to occur, it would be hopeless to think... that a revolutionary Russia, for instance, could hold out in face of conservative Europe, or that a socialist Germany could remain isolated in a capitalist world." The point is about isolation, not about Russian incapacity. The fragment as Basmanov prints it is the one Stalin used at the Seventh Plenum of the Comintern Executive in 1926, and Trotsky answered it there.
The same operation governs the book's central claim. Lenin, Basmanov writes, concluded "that in the epoch of imperialism the socialist revolution could initially win out in a few countries or even in one country," and this was "opposed by Trotsky." Trotsky's theses on permanent revolution say the opposite and say it plainly: "The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it," and "The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena." The dispute was over completion, never over beginning. Collapse the two and you have disposed of an argument that nobody made. It is worth adding that where Basmanov's charges are true they are sourced no better than where they are false: the August 1919 memorandum to the Central Committee proposing a cavalry corps "launched against India," on the argument that "the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal," is a real document and a damaging one, and it carries no footnote either.
There are smaller errors that indicate how the book was assembled. He reports that Max Shachtman "chaired the constituent congress of the 'Fourth International'" and held that the Soviet Union "did not differ in socio-economic structure from the imperialist states," a view Trotsky thought "extreme." Both halves are roughly true and the join is not: Shachtman moved to his position on the USSR in 1940 and split from Trotsky's movement over it, taking a substantial minority and the movement's magazine, The New International, with him — so that everything printed under that title from April 1940 onward belongs to a tendency that had broken with the Fourth International precisely over the question Basmanov is discussing. Presented as a founding characteristic, it becomes evidence of what the International was; presented accurately, it is evidence that the International argued and divided over the nature of the USSR, which is the last impression the book wants to leave. On Trotsky's papers, Basmanov reports that the secret material was "not to be published until 1980," and adds that "historians must not have access to it." The closed section at Harvard opened in January 1980 and has been worked over by historians of every persuasion ever since; the Soviet archives on the same events remained shut for another decade.
The footnotes betray a second habit, and here the criticism has to be precise, because the footnotes are also the book's chief virtue. Basmanov reads the Trotskyist press seriously and widely. He cites International Socialist Review, Quatrième Internationale, The Newsletter, Workers Press, Informations ouvrières, Jeune révolutionnaire, Lutte ouvrière, European Marxist Review and Revista Marxista Latinoamericana. Very little Cold War writing in English in 1973 had that range. But those titles belonged to at least five organisations that had split from one another and regarded each other as enemies — the United Secretariat around Paris, the International Committee around Gerry Healy in London, the current grouped as "For the Reorganization of the Fourth International," the Posadas group in Latin America, and Lutte ouvrière, which was not in the International at all. Basmanov's own text names these bodies separately and describes their rivalry: he notes that the London International Committee and the Latin American Secretariat were "keeping close tab on what their rivals are up to." Then he attributes the statements of each to "the Trotskyites," singular.
The seam shows. Where he wants to prove that the Fourth International misjudged France before May 1968, he quotes Avant-Garde, the paper of the French section's youth organisation — and footnotes it not to Avant-Garde but to The Newsletter, the paper of Healy's Socialist Labour League, which had broken with the French section fifteen years earlier and was quoting it in order to attack it. He introduces the quotation as having appeared three months before the French working people took action in May and June 1968; the citation he gives is dated 18 February 1969 — nine months after. Cohn-Bendit's Obsolete Communism is quoted at length, but from World Marxist Review, Prague, not from the book. Where a source is a party journal, the charge tends to be at second hand.
Some charges are nonetheless substantially true, and the introduction to a volume like this is worth nothing if it will not say so. Juan Posadas did argue that a nuclear war would have progressive consequences, and his followers did write about humanism as a bourgeois instinct. The position existed, it was monstrous, and no account of the period should pretend otherwise. But the chapter Basmanov builds on it is where his method is caught in the act, because for once he gives a page reference and the page can be turned. His three quotations — that a "communist society" could rapidly be constructed on the wreckage; that "the most destructive of wars will necessarily have the most progressive consequences"; that only those ready to settle accounts with capitalism "through a nuclear war" are true revolutionaries — are all footnoted to the International Socialist Review for 1963, No. 4, pages 132 and 134. That is the Fall 1963 issue, and the article on those pages is Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen's "Reunification of the Fourth International," whose entire purpose is to explain why Posadas is not in the Fourth International. The first phrase appears there in the sentence "Posadas, in contrast, believes that a 'communist society' could rapidly be constructed on the wreckage" — "in contrast" to the view, stated immediately before it, that nuclear war "could well mean the finish of civilization if not all the higher forms of life on our globe." The second appears as the end of a sentence beginning "carries it to the absurd conclusion." The third is the authors quoting a Posadist paper as evidence against it. In the same issue, the congress resolution Dynamics of World Revolution Today states the majority's position in six words: "The goal must be to prevent an atomic world war." Basmanov has taken a document expelling a man's politics from a movement and printed it as that movement's politics.
He knew there was a disagreement, because his own source told him, and he wrote the knowledge into the book as a concession before cancelling it: "not all presentday Trotskyites openly agree with Posadas," he writes, and then convicts them anyway — "they share Posadas's ideas, even if they do not always say so in so many words." The reasoning is that since they oppose peaceful coexistence they must want the war; and the same issue he is holding rejects both, in one clause — "the utopian illusions of 'peaceful coexistence' and 'victory' in a nuclear world war." His description of entryism — "secret infiltration of various youth organizations" — is by contrast hostile in wording but accurate in substance; entry work was an avowed tactic, argued about openly in the International's congresses, and here he quotes correctly. The resolution is Dynamics of World Revolution Today and it does say what he says it says: the sections "have no choice but to practice 'entryism'; that is, to participate as an integrated component in the internal life of the mass movement." Basmanov's version reads "international life," which is probably a translator's slip and not a falsification. It is the one place in the book where a Trotskyist document is quoted from itself, and it is accurate. That is not a coincidence.
More than that: the chapter "Students in the 1970s" is the best writing in the book, and it is not polemic at all. Basmanov argues that student militancy has socio-economic and not generational causes, that the expansion of higher education has changed the class composition of the student body, and that "the student today is no longer a potential member of the privileged sections of bourgeois society. At best, he faces the prospect of becoming an exploited wageworker." He records that bourgeois commentary a decade earlier had thought students wanted no more than "an auditorium to dance in all night and toilet paper for the student lavatories," and had been shocked. He concludes that "for all its shortcomings, the student movement has established itself as an important factor of the anti-imperialist struggle" and that "the process of radicalization itself must be welcomed." This is a serious analysis, and it is one the Fourth International would largely have accepted. The book's problem is not that its author was stupid. It is that a competent analyst was set to prove a predetermined conclusion.
That conclusion, and the tone of the whole, is fixed by the year. This is a détente book. The policy it defends against the Trotskyists is peaceful coexistence, and the chapter arguing for it is the calmest in the volume. The most revealing sentence Basmanov writes is a concession: "The Communists may not always be right, but one can hardly deny that they are the most influential political force of our day." It is an argument from weight, not from truth, and it is the argument of a state at the height of its international respectability explaining to nineteen-year-olds why a small organisation with no state behind it should be disregarded. His verdict — "present-day Trotskyism is a petty-bourgeois Left-extremist trend" whose adherents leave "disillusioned and heartsick," so that "many have rejected Trotskyism only to become totally indifferent to politics" — is offered as concern for the young. It reads as an inducement not to look.
A curiosity of the vocabulary is worth recording, because it says something about how these books were made. Ponomarev's directive had specified "opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions." Basmanov, executing it, uses the word "opportunist" exactly once in 24,000 words, inside a quotation from Lenin, and "revisionism" exactly once, inside a quotation from the German Trotskyists he is attacking. In his own voice he uses neither. What he uses instead is "pseudo-," fifteen times; "ultra-Left," thirteen; and then "provocative," "capitulation," "adventurism," "subversive." Four years later, writing The Revolutionary Vanguard with B. M. Leibzon, he produces a book in which "opportunism" and its cognates appear eighty-three times. The word seems to have arrived with the collaborator. That is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that shows a genre assembled from interchangeable parts rather than written. And it makes the more important question easy to ask. Of any book that convicts an opponent of a political vice, one can ask whether the charge is fastened to an act that could be shown not to have happened, and whether the category could ever be turned on the author's own side. Basmanov answers the second himself, and the answer is no. The concession quoted a moment ago is the only one in the volume, and it is withdrawn a few pages later, where he explains that what the Trotskyists "claim are mistakes being made by the Communist parties" are in fact "falsifications of the strategic and tactical propositions of international Communist movement," and that "never has there been a party in history that has been more revolutionary than the Communist party." A mistake is something only the other side can have. The Fourth International's own congress documents of the following year, by contrast, print a section's dated self-criticism by name. The difference is not one of vocabulary. It is a difference in what the vocabulary is allowed to describe.
The reply already existed when this book was printed, and it is locatable. George Saunders's "Notes and Comments on the Basmanov Article" appeared in World Outlook on 22 March 1968, alongside a full translation of Basmanov's 1967 essay; his longer answer, "The Role of Basmanov in the New School of Stalinist Falsification," ran in Intercontinental Press on 27 April 1970, again with Basmanov's own text printed in full opposite it, so that readers could check. Saunders's notes take up precisely the ground this book avoids — the banning of the Left Opposition's platform before the Fifteenth Congress, the GPU raid on its printshop, the "Wrangel officer" who turned out to be a GPU agent, the rigged congress delegation, and the years of prison and camps that followed. He also did, in 1970, what this introduction has done in 2020: he went to the sources Basmanov cited and read them. He found that the Comintern journal cited for one charge did not contain it, and that on another point "the exact opposite of the view Basmanov attributes to the Trotskyists was expressed as recently as in the 1963 resolution of the Fourth International's Reunification Congress, which Basmanov previously indicated he had" read. The correction was in print three years before this book went to press, and this book repeats the practice. The same weekly reported, on 17 June 1974, the appearance of a further Moscow volume, The Communist Struggle Against Trotskyist Ideology, written jointly by Ponomarev with secretaries of the Belgian and Canadian parties and Leo Figueres of the French — the same Figueres whom Basmanov quotes here on the Popular Front. The campaign this book belongs to was, by then, an international editorial project.
One last thing dates the book more sharply than any of its arguments. Basmanov's recurring charge against the French Trotskyists is that their recklessness "gave the authorities the pretext to act as champions of 'law and order.'" On 28 June 1973, while this volume was in production, the French Council of Ministers dissolved the Ligue Communiste by decree, following a demonstration against a meeting of the far-right Ordre Nouveau; sixty-five flats were raided the next morning; Alain Krivine and Pierre Rousset were held in prison. Both the Socialist Party and the French Communist Party issued statements defending the Ligue's right to exist, and Intercontinental Press reported the whole affair in its issue of 9 July 1973 under the headline "Pompidou Outlaws French Trotskyists." The French party's Political Bureau managed both things at once, in a single statement: its opinion of the ultraleft groups was "well known," and "on the political level, it fights their adventurist acts, which the regime uses as an excuse to attack civil liberties" — and then, "the French Communist party protests against the dissolution ordered against the Ligue Communiste," which "sets a grave precedent for democratic rights and freedoms in our country." (The scanned page reads "civU"; the scanner, not the party.) Basmanov's argument and the refutation of its consequences are in the same paragraph, written by the authority he is invoking. The organisation Basmanov spends a hundred pages describing as the beneficiary of bourgeois indulgence — "today, bourgeois propaganda is the Trotskyites' most reliable ideological ally" — was banned by a Western government in the year of his publication, and defended by the very Communist Party whose authority he invokes.
Basmanov's own standard is the fairest one to apply to him. Of Pierre Frank, whose history omits what Basmanov thinks damning, he writes: "if Frank fails to mention them in his book, it does not follow that it was not so. By omitting them from his 'history,' Frank simply misleads the youth." That is correct, and it is why this volume is worth reprinting. It is a document of exactly what the Soviet state was prepared to tell young people in 1973, and of what it could not say. It could not say Stalin. It could not say Barcelona, or Coyoacán, or Vorkuta, or Budapest. Prague it could say twice, both times as the place where a journal is printed. A book written to warn students against being misled is the most complete surviving specimen of the thing it warns against.