This is the second and final volume of the Institute of History's one-volume history of the human race, and it carries the story from the point where the first broke off — the fall of the Russian monarchy — to the moment of writing. Where the companion volume ran from the first stone tools to 1917, this one is entirely modern: the October Revolution and the civil war, the building of Soviet industry, the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the collapse of the colonial empires, the Cold War and the détente of the early 1970s. It closes almost at the instant it went to press. A footnote apologises for arriving too late to be worked into the body of the text: the Paris ceasefire on Vietnam of "January 27, 1973". The narrative reaches Leonid Brezhnev's visit to the United States of June 1973 and the strategic-arms agreements of 1972–73. So there is no lag to argue about here, none of the trap the companion volume set, where a book on the spine dated 1974 was really a decade older. This is a fresh text of 1973, the Russian original and the English (translated by Vladimir Veizy) barely a year apart. Everything it omits, it omits in 1973, with the whole century behind it.
That matters, because the test this volume has to pass is a harder one than its predecessor faced. The first volume's difficulty lay in the deep past — in forcing the agrarian civilisations of antiquity onto a five-runged European ladder, so that a category Marx himself had reserved for Asia left its outline in the book precisely by being unsayable. The reader who wants that argument will find it in the introduction to Volume One. The difficulty here is different and sharper, and it can be stated in a single sentence. This volume must narrate the twentieth century, and the twentieth century is the century of the state that published the book. A world history written in Moscow in 1973 can afford to be candid about the crimes of every ruling class on earth except one. The interesting thing about A Short History of the World — the thing worth the modern reader's attention — is that it is candid about almost all of them, and that watching where the candour stops tells you exactly what the book is and who it was written by.
Begin, as always, with the who. This is again the work of a committee, again of genuine specialists, and again they were good ones. The chapters on the colonial and semi-colonial world — a full third of the book — are shared among the leading Soviet orientalists and Africanists of the day: the Academician Alexander Guber, who had died in 1971 and whose name is printed in mourning rules; Apollon Davidson, the pioneer of African studies in the USSR; Leonid Kutakov, a historian of Japan; and others. The Soviet chapters are by Ilya Berkhin, a historian of the civil war and of socialist construction, and Alexander Chubaryan, later the director of the Institute of General History and a serious student of international relations. The chapter on "The World Socialist System" — the one in which the affairs of the Soviet bloc are narrated — is by Leonid Nezhinsky, a specialist on precisely those countries, and on Hungary in particular. Hold that fact; it will be needed. The presiding editor of the whole two-volume work was Albert Manfred, the outstanding Soviet historian of France. These were not hacks. They were scholars, several of them distinguished, working inside a discipline whose largest questions had been settled by authority before they sat down to write.
The settled framework is the same historical materialism that governs the first volume, but here it has a single organising event, and that event is October 1917. The book's very first chapter is headed "October 1917 Revolution in Russia Ushers in New Era in History of Mankind", and the claim is meant without qualification: October 25 (November 7) 1917 "was a fateful day, as, indeed, it was for the whole of mankind." Everything after it is arranged as consequence. Capitalism enters its "general crisis"; the colonial system disintegrates; a "world socialist system" arises which, by 1970, "proved beyond any doubt its superiority over capitalism". The engine, as in the first volume, is class struggle and the standpoint is that of the labouring majority against those who live off it. As a method this is not to be sneered at, and — this is the point that has to be made before any other — over most of the book it does honest and valuable work.
It is worth being concrete about that, because a reader told everything in the volume is worthless will not believe the part that matters. The anti-colonial chapters are the book's glory. They treat the national movements of Asia, Africa and Latin America as history in their own right, written by people who knew the languages and the sources: the Druse revolt against the French in Syria in 1925, the strike waves of Bombay and Cawnpore, the first African trade unions, Cárdenas's nationalisation of the Mexican railways and oil in the late 1930s, the long unwinding of the British and French empires after 1945. In 1973 this global evenness of attention was rarer in a general survey than it should have been, and much of it holds up. The account of the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet name for the war against Germany of 1941–45 — is the emotional core of the book, and it earns its place: Stalingrad and Kursk rendered at the scale of the individual soldier, the sixteen guardsmen who threw themselves under the tanks, the private Matrosov who stopped a machine-gun with his body. The Soviet share in the destruction of fascism was real and was systematically minimised in the Cold-War West, and the book is right to insist on it. Nor does the materialist eye go blind the moment it leaves Europe. The volume records, flatly and correctly, that after the Indonesian coup of 1965 the army and the Muslim militias conducted "a brutal campaign of anti-communist terror throughout the land, which brought death to several hundred thousand Indonesians" — a massacre the Western press of the day was in no hurry to count. When the crime belongs to somebody else's ruling class, this book will name it, number it and explain it. That is the instrument. Now watch it being switched off.
The first place it goes dark is the Soviet countryside at the turn of the 1930s. The book gives collectivisation a warm and detailed chapter: the tractor stations, the poor peasants of the Berezovka district winning better yields than their neighbours, the kulaks — the well-to-do, labour-employing peasants — sabotaging the collective farms out of class malice. "In the areas of total collectivisation," it writes, "local Soviets were authorised to expropriate from the kulaks land, implements, cattle, and property acquired by exploitation, which meant the liquidation of the kulaks as a class." That is the whole of dekulakisation: an administrative sentence with no human being in it. The deportation of well over a million people to the north and to Central Asia, the deaths in transit and in the special settlements, do not occur. And the famine — the famine of 1932–33, in which several million people starved to death in Ukraine, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan, the direct result of grain requisitioning pressed through a collectivisation the peasants resisted — is not merely uncounted; it has been inverted. The one time the word appears in these pages it is a weapon in the kulaks' hands: "The kulaks started sabotaging government purchases of grain, hoping thereby to cause famine and so wreck the government's economic policy." The famine that happened is gone; a famine that the class enemy intended stands in its place. As for the coercion that was undeniable even in Moscow, it is admitted — but quarantined. Somewhere, "these authorities began forcing the peasants to join collective farms", there were "policy distortions", and the Party corrected them. The excess is real; it has simply been detached from anyone who ordered it. Stalin's name does not appear in the paragraph. This is the first appearance of the book's characteristic move: an error is granted, and in the same breath cut loose from the man and the policy that produced it.
The move reaches its purest form over the Terror. The mass killing of 1936–38 — the show trials, the shooting of the old Bolsheviks, the destruction of the Red Army command, the roughly three-quarters of a million executed and the millions more sent to the camps — is compressed into a few sentences and given a name that does the work of a lid: "the Stalin personality cult". The period, the book says, "was marked by gross violations of Party and Soviet democracy and socialist legality in consequence of the Stalin personality cult". Stalin's fault was "rudeness, capriciousness, intolerance of criticism", and this "led to unjustified restrictions of democracy, gross violations of socialist legality and repressions against prominent Party, government and military leaders and other people." Read that clause again: it is the entire body count of the Great Terror, and it contains not one name, not one number, and not one institution. The Moscow Trials are never mentioned. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov — the men in the dock — appear in this book only earlier and only as villains, the authors of "fallacious anti-Leninist policies"; that they were then tried on fabricated charges and shot is nowhere stated. Marshal Tukhachevsky is named, warmly, as the young commander of the Western Front in 1920; that he was executed in June 1937, and the officer corps gutted after him on the eve of the war the book so movingly narrates, is left out. Stalin himself, we are told, "had won great popularity by his relentless fight against the anti-Leninist groups of the Trotskyites and Bukharinites" — the euphemism performing its function, since the "fight" in question is the one that killed them. And the whole is sealed with a sentence that would be comic if the subject were not what it is: "The personality cult was something quite alien to the Soviet system of government." A phenomenon that consumed the Party's entire leadership is declared foreign to the thing it consumed.
There is a smaller tell inside this passage, and it is the sharpest single thing in the book, because the book supplies the evidence against itself. To show that even Lenin had misgivings about Stalin, the authors quote Lenin's last letter to the Party — the document history calls his Testament. They quote it thus: Stalin, "having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless authority in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to exercise that authority with sufficient discretion." And there they stop. The sentence is genuine and it is mild — a worry about discretion. What the quotation omits is the postscript Lenin added a few days later, in January 1923, in which the worry has hardened into a recommendation: that Stalin was "too rude" for the office, and that "the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." The book quotes Lenin's doubt and cuts Lenin's demand. This is not an accident of compression; it is the operation the whole volume performs in miniature. And the reply to it was written thirty-seven years before this book, by the man this book cannot name. In The Revolution Betrayed of 1936, Leon Trotsky observed that under the new order "the innumerable articles, speeches, and letters of Lenin, ending in his 'testament', will continue under the new constitution to be locked up merely because they rub the new leaders the wrong way." The Testament was suppressed in the USSR for exactly the reasons that made this book quote only its harmless half.
The third dark place is August 1939. The Soviet–German non-aggression pact is admitted — it could hardly be denied — and defended as a breathing space: Germany's offer was insincere, the USSR knew it, but "it needed time the better to prepare for the impending war and was thus left no choice but to accept the offer". A serious case can be made along those lines, and honest historians have made it. But the book makes it by removing the evidence that complicates it. The Secret Additional Protocol — the annex in which Berlin and Moscow divided Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia into spheres of interest — is not mentioned. Its consequences are then narrated as though they had fallen from the sky, or rather as though they had welled up from below. The Red Army's entry into eastern Poland on 17 September becomes "a mission of liberation which resulted in the reunion of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia". The annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia becomes a set of spontaneous revolutions: the peoples "rose in revolt and overthrew their pro-nazi governments", held "genuinely free elections", and "applied to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for admission". The war against Finland becomes Finnish aggression — "Finland's rulers ended by provoking an armed clash". Every one of these was, in fact, an act of the Soviet state carried out under a secret agreement with Hitler; every one is rewritten so that the Soviet state is the object of others' actions, or the mere ratifier of the people's will. (Our own tradition holds itself to this same standard, and should: Ernest Mandel, whose The Meaning of the Second World War is the best short Marxist account of the conflict, misdated the signing of that Secret Protocol to 27 August — it was signed on the night of 23 August 1939. The date is correctable; the protocol is not deniable.)
The fourth place is Hungary, and here the operation is at its most revealing, because the book does not fall silent — it tells the story, and the story has had one actor surgically removed. The events of October–November 1956 appear as "counter-revolutionary forces, directly incited and aided by aggressive elements in Western states", attempting "a coup d'etat" to tear Hungary out of the socialist camp; the Hungarian people rejected them; and "a Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Government set up on November 4, 1956", headed by János Kádár, restored order and resumed the march to socialism. Notice what is missing from that November the 4th. The government was "set up" — by whom, the sentence does not say — on the very day that Soviet tanks entered Budapest in force and crushed the rising in a week of fighting that killed thousands. The intervention that is the whole meaning of the date has been dissolved into the passive voice. Imre Nagy, the reform-communist premier the Soviets removed and later had shot, is not named. The single largest use of Soviet military power in Europe between 1945 and 1968 has been narrated with the Soviet military left out. And the man who wrote the chapter, Leonid Nezhinsky, was a specialist on Hungary. He of all the contributors knew what happened on 4 November. He wrote the sentence that leaves it out.
The fifth place is not dark; it is simply not there. Czechoslovakia in 1968 — the Prague Spring and the invasion of the country by five Warsaw Pact armies in August of that year — does not appear in this book at all. This is worth dwelling on, because it is the cleanest silence in the volume and the least defensible. The invasion was five years old when the book went to press; it was the defining event of the socialist bloc in the years the book was actually written; and there was a chapter, "The World Socialist System", whose whole subject it was. The book finds room in that chapter for the constitutions of the socialist states, for the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, for the 1966 Warsaw Treaty proposal on European security. It cannot find room for the half-million troops who occupied a fraternal socialist country to depose its communist leadership. Throughout the volume the word for a foreign army sent to reverse a nation's chosen course is "intervention", and it is applied without stint to the Americans in Korea and Vietnam, to Britain, France and Israel at Suez in 1956, to every imperialist adventure the century offers. The one intervention it will not name is the one its own state carried out.
Set these five cases beside the Indonesian massacre the book counted so exactly, and the pattern resolves. It is not that the authors could not see ruling-class crime; the volume is full of ruling-class crime, seen clearly and told well. It is that a single question is never allowed to turn inward. The book will admit that individual Bolsheviks erred — that collectivisation had "distortions", that Stalin was rude, that mistakes were made. What it will never do is apply its own categories — counter-revolution, terror, intervention, the crime of a ruling class against the people it rules — to the Soviet state itself. Error is admissible; the category is not. That is the discriminator, and it is worth more than any tally of adjectives, because a book may be candid about a hundred small mistakes and still be built on this one silence.
The reply to that silence is not the property of anti-communism; it was made from inside the revolutionary tradition, in real time, by the people the book cannot mention. Consider first the erasure that founds all the others. This is a history of the October Revolution in which Trotsky does not appear. He chaired the Petrograd Soviet in 1917; he chaired the Military Revolutionary Committee that actually organised the insurrection; and in this account of that insurrection his name is absent, surfacing later only as the author of a "pernicious policy". The authors even quote, for colour, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World — the eyewitness classic whose pages are full of Trotsky, and which was quietly withdrawn from Soviet circulation for that very reason — while stepping around the figure who fills it. The reader who wants the insurrection told by the man who ran it has Trotsky's own History of the Russian Revolution (1932); the reader who wants the official history of the world communist movement answered has The Third International After Lenin (1928).
But the standing answer to a book like this is The Revolution Betrayed, which Trotsky finished in 1936, the year of the first Moscow Trial and of the Constitution this volume celebrates. It supplies precisely the category the Institute has removed: the Soviet bureaucracy not as a collection of flawed individuals but as a privileged ruling stratum with interests of its own, a caste thrown up by the ebb of the revolution and the defeat of its allies abroad. "The bureaucracy conquered something more than the Left Opposition," Trotsky wrote. "It conquered the Bolshevik party. It defeated the program of Lenin." Of the whole process he offered an image this volume's authors could not have printed and could not have refuted: "The leaden rump of bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution." Where A Short History of the World explains the Terror as one man's rudeness, The Revolution Betrayed had already explained, in advance, the social machinery that made the man necessary and the Terror possible. And on the 1937 elections in which "98.69 per cent" of the vote went to the bloc of Communists and non-Party candidates — which this book presents as democracy triumphant — Trotsky's chapter on the 1936 Constitution is the direct answer, noting that Stalin himself had conceded the secret ballot was needed because "the 'Soviet people' cannot yet vote for those whom they want to elect." As for the trials, the American philosopher John Dewey chaired the independent commission of inquiry whose 1938 report, Not Guilty, found the charges fabricated; and the Left Opposition's own journal, the Bulletin of the Opposition, was reporting the coming frame-ups month by month as they were prepared. The materials for the correction existed, in print, in the languages this book was translated into, the entire time.
None of which is a reason to discard the volume. It is, over great stretches, exactly what it claims to be: a genuine world history, attentive to the whole planet and to the people who did its labour and its dying, and better on the colonial world and the anti-fascist war than most of what the Cold-War West was producing alongside it. Use it for that, and use it well. But read its account of the Soviet century with the one question held steadily in view — is the category ever turned inward? — and the book divides cleanly in two. Where it narrates the crimes of others, it is a work of history. Where it reaches its own state, the historian's instrument, kept so sharp for every other ruling class of the age, is set carefully down. The scholars who wrote this book knew how to see a ruling class killing the people beneath it; they proved it, page after page, from Java to the Suez Canal. There was one such scene they were not permitted to describe, and it was the one outside their own windows.