This book exists to establish that peaceful coexistence is Lenin's doctrine. It is 92,000 words long, it cites Lenin's Collected Works eighty-one times, and in the whole of it the phrase "peaceful coexistence" never once appears inside a quotation from Lenin.
That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a countable fact about the text, and Tomashevsky is honest enough that a careful reader can establish it from his own footnotes. The single Lenin quotation he offers as the doctrine's textual foundation runs: "...The period of the coexistence side by side of socialist and capitalist states" has begun. It carries a leading ellipsis, it is sourced to volume 30 of the Collected Works, and it does not contain the word "peaceful". It is a description of a situation — two kinds of state now exist at once — not a prescription for policy. Tomashevsky knows the gap is there, and he bridges it in the following sentence with a verb that gives the whole game away: "The principle of peaceful coexistence logically followed from Lenin's conception of socialist foreign policy."
Followed. Not was stated by. The book's central claim is a derivation, and Tomashevsky says so.
Fifty pages later he supplies, without appearing to notice, the fact that finishes the argument. Reporting Soviet diplomacy after the Civil War, he writes: "Georgi Chicherin said in June 1920: 'Our slogan was and still remains the same: peaceful coexistence with other governments no matter who they are.'" That is the earliest attested use of the actual phrase anywhere in this book, and it belongs to the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, not to Lenin. Everything else with the phrase inside quotation marks comes from the 14th and 15th Congresses, the 1960 and 1969 Moscow Meetings, the CPSU Programme, the 23rd and 24th Congresses, the Lenin Centenary Theses, Gus Hall, Georges Marchais. The doctrine has an institutional pedigree of great length and considerable seriousness. It does not have the pedigree the title claims for it.
The copyright page settles the printing history in one line: first printing 1974, © Progress Publishers 1974. Translated from the Russian by Jim Riordan. No earlier edition, no revision note — so, unusually for this series, the spine date is not misleading about the printing.
The text, though, closes earlier than that, and the closing date matters enormously for this particular subject. The latest datable events are the April 1973 Plenary Meeting of the CPSU Central Committee; Brezhnev's visits to the United States, West Germany and France "in 1973"; the Paris agreements, which appear as "The termination of the war in Vietnam"; and "the successful beginnings of the European Conference on Security and Co-operation" — the first stage of which met at Helsinki in July 1973. The years 1974 and 1975 occur in the body of the book only as the terminal year of the Ninth Five-Year Plan. The manuscript was finished in the summer of 1973 and not touched again.
The seams show. One passage still treats the Helsinki process as a matter of arrangements not yet made: the multilateral consultations that "began in Helsinki, in November 1972" are described as existing "to determine the time, place, participants and agenda of the conference, in other words, procedural and organisational questions in the main." Another passage, plainly written later, already celebrates the conference's "successful beginnings". The book was assembled in layers and the layers were not reconciled.
Two things follow, and they are not the same thing. Chile does not appear in this book — not the country, not Allende, not Unidad Popular, not one word — and neither does the October war. Tomashevsky's manuscript closed before 11 September and before 6 October 1973, so this is not suppression on his part. But Progress Publishers held the English text for the better part of a year and printed it in 1974 without adding a line. A reader who bought a book called Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations in London or Delhi in 1974 was handed an account of the world in which the previous eighteen months' single most consequential test of the doctrine had not occurred.
The book supplies no biography at all. "D. Tomashevsky" is the whole of it: no institute, no degree, no position. I have not been able to source an institutional affiliation for him from any material held here, and I will not invent one. What the book is can be read off its apparatus without needing the author's job title. The 24th Congress of the CPSU is invoked twenty-nine times and its Peace Programme is the organising document of the Afterword; the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties supplies the authorities of last resort; Kádár, Marchais and Gus Hall are quoted approvingly. This is an export volume addressed to the Western and non-aligned communist parties and their periphery, and its commission is legible in every chapter: to establish that détente with Nixon's America was not a retreat from revolution but its Leninist form.
That case is not self-evidently dishonest, and the chapter where Tomashevsky makes it best deserves to be read before anything else in the book.
"A Matter of Life or Death for Millions" is a serious, well-organised treatment of war in Marxist terms, and much of it would survive translation into any tradition. Its method is genuinely Lenin's: that the character of a war is determined by its class and political content and not by who fired first; that "One cannot understand the present war without understanding the epoch"; that Clausewitz's formula needs a class subject, war being "the continuation, by violent means, of the politics pursued by the ruling classes of the belligerent powers long before the outbreak of war". Tomashevsky quotes Lenin holding that "As a general rule, war is legitimate on the part of the oppressed" and that revolutionary wars "may prove necessary in the interests of socialism". He is not smuggling pacifism in under Lenin's name; he says plainly that coexistence "has nothing in common with class peace and leaves no doubt about the sacred right of the oppressed peoples to employ every means in their fight for liberation, up to and including armed struggle."
And on the specific question that the chapter is built around, he is right. Against the position that a world war would hasten the end of capitalism and should therefore be welcomed, he writes that such reasoning, "which is typical of Maoism, has nothing to do with a Marxist specific and historical analysis of social phenomena on which Lenin tirelessly insisted." He cites Mao's remark at Chengtu that if the atomic bomb reduced the Chinese people to ashes they could begin again and build better; he records that "The 9th Congress of the Communist Party of China officially recorded the thesis of the inevitability and even desirability of war"; he calls the slogan of "a revolutionary war of the world village against the world city" irresponsible. A thermonuclear exchange would have destroyed the productive forces on which any socialism depends and killed the class that was supposed to inherit them. Saying so is not a betrayal of Marxism, and a critic who cannot concede it has not understood what the argument was about.
He is honest, too, about what Lenin actually said on the subject of living alongside capitalism, and he does not sand off the edges. He quotes Lenin: "We never imagined that with the fighting over and the advent of peace, the capitalist wolf would lie down with the socialist lamb." He records that Lenin "never considered it automatically ensured or 'eternal'". He quotes him wanting trade and nothing more mystical than trade — "I know of no reason why a socialist commonwealth like ours cannot do business indefinitely with capitalist countries" — and he correctly represents Lenin's post-Civil-War aim as switching "from our relations of war with the capitalist countries to relations of peace and trade." All of that is real, all of it is Lenin, and none of it is embarrassing to Tomashevsky's case that a workers' state needed a breathing space and was entitled to buy one.
The trouble begins exactly where the breathing space becomes a world outlook.
Lenin's coexistence was a respite inside an expected sequence. In the same period from which Tomashevsky draws — November 1920 — Lenin put it in terms his 1974 expositor never quotes: "We have now passed from the arena of war to the arena of peace and we have not forgotten that war will come again. As long as capitalism and socialism remain side by side we cannot live peacefully — the one or the other will be the victor in the end." Trotsky reproduced that passage in The Third International After Lenin (1928, ch. I), and it is the exact counterweight to the volume-30 fragment. Both are Lenin; only one of them is quoted here. A doctrine that turns "we cannot live peacefully" into a permanent principle of international relations has not been derived from Lenin. It has been built next to him.
Trotsky also supplied, in the same chapter, the genealogy that this book's title is designed to prevent the reader from looking for. Discussing Georg von Vollmar's 1878 pamphlet The Isolated Socialist State, Trotsky notes that Vollmar's scheme for a socialist Germany trading its way to victory over world capitalism "is based on the perspective of a peaceful coexistence of the socialist and capitalist systems". The phrase and the underlying idea reached Marxism a generation before the October Revolution, from German social democracy, and Trotsky's point was that they arrive together with the notion of a self-sufficient national socialism. That is the argument Tomashevsky has to answer and never states: not that coexistence is cowardly, but that it is the foreign policy of socialism in one country, and that the two propositions stand or fall together.
The Revolution Betrayed (1936) put the charge in one sentence, in the chapter on foreign policy and the army: "The perspective of world revolution gave place to the deification of the status quo." Trotsky's sarcasm there — "What could be finer, when all is said and done, than an eternal pact of non-aggression between socialism and capitalism?" — is aimed at precisely the formulation this book calls Leninist.
Tomashevsky does have a defence, and it is the one the whole international movement used: coexistence is "a specific form of class struggle in the world", applying between states and not within them. He states it carefully. Communists, he writes, "look upon it as a principle of relations between countries but completely inapplicable to the class struggle within individual countries, to relations between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed". As a piece of doctrine that is coherent. As a description of what the policy did, it collapses the moment a revolution abroad becomes inconvenient to a negotiation in Moscow — which is why the missing eighteen months matter so much, and why the book cannot afford Chile.
Trotsky and Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky appears four times, all in a single stretch on the peace treaty, and the passage contains a specific, checkable falsification. Tomashevsky writes that Lenin substantiated coexistence "in the hard struggle against Trotsky and the 'Left'-wing Communists", whose position, he says, "in principle renounced the possibility and expediency of any relations with capitalist countries other than 'revolutionary war'." He then adds: "Typical in that respect was the position of Trotsky, who was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs after the October Revolution."
It was not typical of it. Revolutionary war was Bukharin's position and the Left Communists', and Tomashevsky quotes Bukharin saying so — "there can never be peaceful coexistence between us" — from the stenographic record of the Seventh Congress. Trotsky's position at Brest was the quite different, and quite unsuccessful, formula of neither war nor peace: refuse to sign, refuse to fight, break off and declare the war ended. One can think that policy was a catastrophe, as Lenin did; one cannot describe it as a demand for revolutionary war, because it was constructed precisely to avoid one. The amalgam merges two opposed positions into a single heresy so that one refutation disposes of both. It is worth noting that the companion Progress volume in this series, Arbatov's The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations (1973), performs the same amalgam in almost the same words. It was house doctrine, not a slip.
The supporting quotation is worth a second look as well. "Will we have any diplomatic work? I shall make a few revolutionary appeals and then shut up shop" is footnoted not to Trotsky but to S. Zarnitsky and A. Sergeyev's biography of Chicherin, Moscow 1966, in Russian — a Soviet secondary source published thirty years after Trotsky's expulsion from history. The remark is widely reported and may well be substantially what he said; but a book that quotes Lenin from the Collected Works eighty-one times reaches for a 1966 party biography the moment its subject is Trotsky, and the reader is entitled to notice.
Stalin. The name occurs once in this book, in the title of a work by George Kennan cited in a footnote. He is nonetheless quoted. Tomashevsky writes that "The Central Committee's political report to the 15th Party Congress stated: 'The basis of our relations with the capitalist states lies in the acceptance of coexistence between the two opposing systems. Practice has completely justified that.'" The political report of the Central Committee to the 15th Congress, in December 1927, was delivered by Stalin. (The footnote as printed reads "16th Congress of the RCP(B). December 1927" — the congress that met in December 1927 was the 15th, and by then the party had not been the RCP(B) for two years; the note is garbled in a way I cannot untangle from the scan.) The effect, however it arose, is that the doctrine's most authoritative early formulation is presented anonymously, as the voice of an institution. A book arguing that a policy descends from Lenin has quietly removed the man it actually descends through.
Czechoslovakia. Five mentions, one of them the event. It is handled in a single sentence and a half: hostile classes "can in certain conditions grow active, and, counting on outside support from imperialism, take their opposition as far as direct counter-revolutionary actions. This was apparent, in particular, in the political events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia." Then: "The strength and effectiveness of the internationalist solidarity of socialist countries frustrated the attempt by the remnants of the former exploiting classes in alliance with Right-wing opportunists and with support from world imperialism to destroy the fundamentals of the socialist system in Czechoslovakia". Five armies, half a million troops, the abduction of a communist party's leadership — all of it is inside the phrase "internationalist solidarity". Dubček is not named. Neither the phrase "Brezhnev Doctrine" nor "limited sovereignty" occurs anywhere in the book, which is unsurprising, since it was written for readers who might use them. Elsewhere in this series, the Progress volume Socialist Internationalism (1982) at least denies the doctrine before restating it; Tomashevsky simply installs it.
The placement is what makes it lethal to his own argument. The Czechoslovak sentence sits in a chapter about relations between socialist states, safely walled off from the chapter on coexistence, where the principle under discussion is stated as flowing from "the right of every nation freely, without outside interference, to arrange its affairs as it desires" and presupposing "a renunciation of attempts at interference in the internal affairs of another country." Non-interference is a law of nature when the other state is capitalist and an error of formalism when it is not.
Hungary. The word occurs once as a country name, in a list of states that began building socialism. Nineteen fifty-six is absent. This is not merely a gap: János Kádár is quoted twice as a political authority, at the 1969 Moscow Meeting and in a Central Committee resolution endorsing the 24th Congress, and how Kádár came to be First Secretary is not a matter the book can raise. Yugoslavia appears twice, in lists; 1948 does not appear at all. The one break in the postwar communist world that the book can narrate is China's, and it narrates it at length and with real anger — "great-Power chauvinism and hegemonism", the border incidents of 1969, Albania's departure from the Warsaw Treaty. The rule is legible: schisms are discussable when the other side left.
The Fourth International argued against this doctrine continuously from the 1920s, and in the exact months Tomashevsky's manuscript was closing it was arguing about the thing his book cannot mention.
Milton Alvin's "'Peaceful Coexistence' — An Obstacle to Revolution", the last of four weekly instalments of a series called "Fifty Years of Stalinist Treachery", appeared in Intercontinental Press, vol. 11 no. 35, 8 October 1973 — under four weeks after the coup in Santiago. Its charge is the structural one: the communist parties' "main purpose is to settle for 'peaceful coexistence' between the Soviet bureaucracy and world imperialism. Everything is subordinated to that."
Alvin then added a fifth piece, "A Postscript — Chile" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 11 no. 37, 22 October 1973), which is the reply Tomashevsky's chapter on the developing countries was written to forestall and which he could not have read. Its indictment is of a strategy, not of a temperament: that Unidad Popular "did not touch the real institutions, the repressive instruments of the capitalist state — the police, the armed forces, the courts, prisons and legislature", and that "Instead of putting the generals in jail, the Stalinist-Social Democratic bloc put them in the cabinet." One may reject the conclusion. It is not a demand for nuclear war.
That is a general accusation. The specific one came in the same magazine five weeks later. Gerry Foley's "Moscow's New Line on Struggle in Chile" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 11 no. 42, 26 November 1973) reads the Argentine and Soviet party press after the coup and finds the militant tone unaccompanied by any change of policy: the lesson the Argentine Communist Party drew from the collapse of Unidad Popular "was the need to follow exactly the same policy that paved the way for the bloody coup across the Andes." (Foley also records, from Le Monde Diplomatique of November 1973, Pinochet's boast to a circle of officers after the coup about how completely Allende had trusted him.) The year-end summary in Intercontinental Press, vol. 11 no. 46, 24 December 1973, states the verdict flatly: "The defeat of the Chilean workers in the week of September 11 was a stunning blow for which the Communist party in Chile and its mentors in the Kremlin hold full responsibility. They betrayed the Chilean revolution by presenting Allende's popular-front government as a model of peaceful transition to socialism."
A year later the Fourth International's Tenth World Congress put the theory behind the charge on the record. In "Good Grounds for Revolutionary Optimism", by Joseph Hansen, printed in the documents issue of Intercontinental Press, vol. 12 no. 46, 23 December 1974, the formulation is: "As the governmental representative of this caste, Stalin — and his heirs after him — followed a policy calculated to maintain the status quo on an international scale, calling this 'peaceful coexistence.'"
The fairest and most complete statement of the case, though, comes later, and it is the one worth setting against Tomashevsky's strongest pages, because it concedes what he is right about. John Ross and Ernest Mandel, in "The Need for a Revolutionary International" (International Marxist Review, vol. 1 no. 1, Spring 1982, pp. 38–39), trace the doctrine to its root — the theory of socialism in one country "expressed the basic conservatism of the Soviet bureaucracy, its turning away from world revolution towards maintenance of the international 'status quo', i.e. peaceful coexistence with imperialism" — and then immediately mark out what the criticism does not claim:
While revolutionary Marxists never called upon the Soviet Union, its workers government, to artificially 'provoke' revolutions elsewhere to 'further' them through military adventures abroad, or to 'sit and wait' before developing the Soviet economy and society towards socialism till international revolution would finally triumph, they fully understood that the fate of the Soviet Union ... remained intimately and finally tied to the outcome of class struggles on a world scale.
The obligation they draw from this is not adventurism but its opposite of inaction: "the Soviet Union had the duty to help and further world revolution in all those cases where revolutionary mass struggles and deep revolutionary crises in one or several countries clearly testified to the objective possibilities of achieving new revolutionary victories." That is the standard against which September 1973 should be measured, and it is a standard Tomashevsky could have engaged with. His book instead treats every critic of coexistence as a Maoist demanding nuclear war, which is a real position he refutes well, and not the position that most needed refuting.
Read for what it is, this is a competent and in places genuinely thoughtful book, written by someone who had thought hard about war. Its chapter on war and peace is the best thing in it and would repay reading by anyone who imagines Soviet writing on the subject was all boilerplate. Its account of imperialism's record in the newly independent countries is a list of real events, correctly dated. Its refusal of the convergence theory is argued and not merely asserted.
But its title makes a promise it cannot keep, and it keeps failing to keep it in the same place each time. Every time the argument reaches the point where Lenin should be quoted saying the thing, the citation turns out to be Chicherin in 1920, or the 15th Congress in 1927, or the Moscow Meeting in 1960, or the Party Programme, or the 24th Congress — a genuine tradition, seriously constructed, with its own real arguments about the nuclear age, and not the tradition named on the cover. What Tomashevsky has written is a good statement of Soviet foreign policy in the summer of 1973 dressed as an exegesis of Lenin. The dress does not fit, and the seams are all in his own footnotes.
Thirteen years later the seams gave. Ernest Mandel, in "The Significance of Gorbachov" (International Marxist Review, vol. 2 no. 4, Winter 1987, p. 31), noted what had become of the other half of the formula: "Like the world revolution, the international elimination of capitalism has even formally disappeared from its objectives — it is not even mentioned in the new programme of the CPSU adopted at the 27th Congress". The class struggle that coexistence was supposed to be a specific form of had been dropped, and only the coexistence was left. Tomashevsky's book is worth keeping because it is the fullest English statement of the doctrine at the moment before that happened, made by someone who still believed both halves.