The premise on which this volume was approached was that it would be the book where the accounting finally happened. A companion introduction to the 1939 Short Course established that the word "Comintern" does not appear in that textbook even once — a manual for the world movement containing no history of the world movement. Here at last, thirty-four years later, is a Progress volume actually called The World Communist Movement, running to some 158,000 words. Surely this is where the gap gets filled.
It is not. The gap is not filled; it is enlarged and furnished. "Comintern" occurs eleven times in the whole book and "Communist International" seven. Set against that: the name Stalin appears zero times. So does Hitler. So does Dimitrov. So does the year 1943, and the year 1937, and the word Cominform. There is no chapter on the history of the Communist International, no narrative of its congresses beyond passing citation, no account of its dissolution, no mention of the split with Yugoslavia, and no acknowledgement anywhere that a single communist was ever killed by a communist state in Europe. What the reader gets instead is a doctrinal handbook: eleven chapters of strategy, tactics, alliances, work among women, work among Catholics, work in the trade unions. The past enters only as a supply of usable precedents.
That is the finding, and it is worth being precise about what kind of finding it is. The Short Course falsified. This book, for the most part, does something different and in some ways more effective: it declines to narrate at all. You cannot catch it lying about 1933 because it never mentions 1933.
The Russian original, Международное коммунистическое движение, was produced by a collective — V. V. Alexandrov, Y. V. Dobrotin, S. S. Gililov, V. B. Knyazhinsky, I. I. Lunev, N. G. Sibilev, V. V. Sukhanov, V. A. Trofimov and V. V. Zagladin, with five further contributors named in the preface — and translated into English by Julius Kalzer. The name that fixes the book's institutional address is Zagladin's. Reporting from Moscow in June 1972, a year before this volume appeared, Hedrick Smith of the New York Times — in a passage Intercontinental Press reprinted that July — identified Vadim V. Zagladin as "deputy chief of the Central Committee's department for relations with other Communist parties", and had him publicly answering a North Vietnamese army newspaper that had accused the Kremlin of setting its own "national interests against the interests of world revolution". This is not a work of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, still less of the Academy of Sciences. It is a product of the department that handled the fraternal parties, written for them, by one of the officials who handled them.
Its occasion is stated openly in the preface: the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in June 1969, whose concluding Document is quoted on almost every second page, together with the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU (1971) and Brezhnev's Following Lenin's Course. The 1969 Meeting was the last of its kind, convened after the Sino-Soviet rupture and a year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and it did not go smoothly. Its purpose was to reassert Moscow's authority over a movement that was visibly fragmenting. This book is the codification of that meeting's line, packaged for export in the language of international circulation. Its enemies, in order of the space allotted, are the leadership of the Communist Party of China, "Right-wing revisionism" in the socialist countries, and "neo-Trotskyism". Its détente-era register is unmistakable: the August 1970 treaty with West Germany is praised, peaceful coexistence and the peaceful road to power are affirmed at length, and the tone throughout is that of a great power explaining itself to allies rather than a general staff issuing orders.
Take the episodes in turn.
The Third Period and Germany. The phrase "social fascism" appears nowhere. Neither does "Third Period". Neither does Hitler, nor the KPD, nor the Reichstag, nor 30 January 1933. The entire catastrophe is compressed into two sentences in the chapter on strategy:
Thus, errors were made in this question in the late twenties and the early thirties, at the beginning of the struggle against fascism. At that time, the opinion was widespread in the ranks of the communist movement that it was Social–Democracy which was the main enemy and was splitting the forces of the working class.
Read the grammar. Errors were made. The opinion was widespread. No one adopts the line, no body promulgates it, no country suffers from it. Elsewhere the same events are attributed to "sectarian elements in some of the Communist Parties and in the Comintern" — elements, unnamed, plural, diffuse. In fact the line was not an opinion that spread. It was adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928 and hardened at the Tenth Plenum of its Executive in 1929; it was enforced from Moscow on parties that had little say in it; and it held that social democracy and fascism were twins, so that a united front against Hitler was ruled out as a matter of principle. The German party polled close to six million votes in November 1932 and was destroyed within months of Hitler taking office, its cadres killed or driven abroad, without a general strike being called. The most sustained contemporary argument against that line — written while it could still have been reversed — is Trotsky's German writings of 1930–33, collected as The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, of which the 1932 pamphlet What Next? is the central text. Nothing in this book engages with them, because nothing in this book concedes there was anything to engage with.
1935. The Seventh Congress is the one Comintern event the book genuinely values, and it values it as an exoneration: the "sectarian errors were roundly condemned by the Comintern's Seventh Congress in 1935, which fully restored and further developed Lenin's views on working-class unity. Since then the communist movement has unswervingly followed this policy." Unswervingly is doing enormous work. It has to cover August 1939 — the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which appears in this book not at all; the words Molotov and Ribbentrop are absent, as is any reference to a non-aggression treaty. It also has to cover Spain. Spain is mentioned sixteen times, always as a country under Franco where communists work underground; the civil war appears once, as an instance of Soviet solidarity ("aid to the Spanish people in the civil war against the fascists in 1936–1939"). The POUM is not named. Neither is the CNT. The suppression of the Barcelona left in May 1937, and the murder of Andreu Nin, have no place in a book about the world communist movement.
1943 and 1948. The dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943 is simply not in the book; nor is any reason for it, good or bad. The Cominform, founded in 1947 and wound up in 1956, is not mentioned. The 1948 expulsion of Yugoslavia — the campaign of denunciation, the show trials of "Titoists" in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia that followed from it — is absent, and this produces the volume's strangest passage. Yugoslavia appears three times, and never as a country with a history: once in a list of places where the world bourgeoisie backs a deviation, once as a place where "revisionist and anti-Party elements" do harm, and once through Milovan Djilas, "the Yugoslav revisionist and renegade from communism". Between the second and the third, "Josip Broz Tito, Chairman of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia" is reported at length, by name and full title and with evident respect, on the need to strengthen the League. The post-1955 reconciliation is thus registered in the book's manners while the quarrel that made reconciliation necessary is erased. A reader in Lima or Lagos in 1973 would close the book with no idea that Yugoslavia had ever been expelled from anything.
China. Here the book is voluble. A full section, "The Anti-Leninist Course Followed by the CPC's Leaders", sets out the Soviet case: great-power nationalism, the substitution of the "rural world" for the working class, "military-bureaucratic" rule, anti-Sovietism as a programme. Much of this polemic lands. But it is polemic without chronology — no date is given for when the dispute began, and no document is cited from either side. The border is the sharpest case. The book reports that "a meeting of heads of government was held in Peking in September 1969 on the initiative of the USSR, and border talks are in progress"; it never says what happened on that border in March and August of 1969 to make talks necessary. The words Ussuri and Damansky do not occur. As with Yugoslavia, the reconciliation is registered and the quarrel that required it is deleted. And the argument reaches for the tradition's oldest reflex: the Chinese leaders are convicted of advancing "the Trotskyite thesis that socialism cannot be fully victorious" until world revolution triumphs. Forty-five years after the fact, socialism in one country remains the test of orthodoxy, and its denial remains a police category rather than a proposition.
One sentence in this section deserves to be quoted for what it inadvertently concedes. Of the Cultural Revolution: "with many Party veterans and Marxist-Leninist internationalist cadres and hundreds of thousands of Communists falling victims to repression." That is the only place in 158,000 words where communists are described as victims of a communist party's repression — and it is about China. The same book's account of the crimes of Stalinism amounts to a formula borrowed from the 1960 Meeting: a grave threat is presented by "the personality cult, which is connected with a departure from Leninist principles of Party and state leadership, and with considerable infringements of socialist legality". No cult is named. No legality is specified. And the illustration offered immediately afterwards is, again, Mao.
So the Comintern's own foreign cadres are nowhere. The Polish Communist Party, dissolved by the Comintern's executive in 1938 with its leaders — Adolf Warski, Maria Koszutska, Julian Leński among them — shot or dead in Soviet custody, is unmentioned; Poland appears twice in this book, both times in connection with the multi-party systems of the 1940s. Béla Kun, who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, is not named at all — though that republic is narrated here warmly and at length, with Lenin's greeting quoted, as a model of the peaceful transfer of power. Kun was arrested in Moscow in 1937 and executed. The book celebrates his revolution and cannot pronounce his name.
1956 and 1968. Both are present, and both appear only as lessons in vigilance. The characteristic formulation is parenthetical: the 1969 Meeting concluded, "with due account of the events in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968", that socialism's victory is guaranteed only by "internationalist co-operation between the fraternal Parties". On Czechoslovakia the book's verdict is that "the root cause of the political crisis and the mounting counter-revolutionary pressure in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the deviation from the fundamental Leninist principles". Note how the intervention itself is rendered. The Warsaw Pact armies entered on the night of 20–21 August 1968; the book calls this "immediate outside help from the USSR and our other allies" (quoting the Czechoslovak party's own 1970 self-condemnation) and "fraternal help from the other socialist states, who were performing their class and internationalist duty". The phrase "Soviet troops" does not occur in this volume. The Soviet Army occurs five times — destroying Nazism, standing in the liberated states of eastern Europe in 1945, and once as the standing guarantor of "the socialist gains of the entire socialist community", "ready at any moment to come to the aid of the fraternal countries in the struggle against imperialism and counter-revolution" — but never in Czechoslovakia. The Warsaw Treaty Organisation is named twice, both times as a co-ordinating centre for foreign policy. So the doctrine that justified August 1968 is stated in full, in the abstract, on one page, and the event it justified is described on another as help. Dubček is not named, nor is Nagy.
The Fourth International is not named once. Trotskyism is discussed across a dedicated subsection, but always as "neo-Trotskyism", "grouplets", "a hotch-potch of groups and grouplets whose membership does not as a rule exceed several dozen people". An organisation founded in 1938 with sections on four continents is thereby denied even the dignity of an existence, which is the same technique applied to the Comintern's own history, run in the other direction: what cannot be discussed is not given a name.
A book that will not narrate must still classify, and this one classifies harder than almost anything else Progress printed. Opportunism and its cognates occur 203 times in 158,578 words — 12.80 per ten thousand, against an average of 1.55 across the 195 volumes measured for this series, and second only to volume 3 of The International Working-Class Movement. Around it sits the rest of the family: revisionism 122 times, sectarian 48, dogmatism 32. This is not incidental usage. The preface announces it — the book "deals with current problems in the Communist and Workers' Parties' struggle against Right-wing and 'Left'-wing opportunism" — and chapter X, forty-odd pages of it, is titled "The Communist Parties' Struggle Against Right- and 'Left'-Wing Opportunism", with a section apiece for the sources, the Right-wing forms, the "Left"-wing forms, and the kinship between them.
It would be easy, and wrong, to make the count itself the charge. When the Fourth International held its Tenth World Congress and Intercontinental Press printed the documents entire — 129,943 words in the issue of 23 December 1974 — the same word family occurs there at 1.69 per ten thousand, against the Progress corpus's 1.55. On frequency the two traditions are indistinguishable. Anyone who argues from the tally is making an argument his own side loses.
What can be tested is what the word is asked to do. Two questions settle it. Is the accusation attached to an act specific enough that it could be shown not to have happened? And could the category, as the book defines it, ever be turned on the author's own side?
On the first, the book gives two different answers depending on which way the accused is said to have deviated, and the split is the finding. Against Right-wing opportunism it is exact, and it is checkable. Roger Garaudy is named; the theses attributed to him are stated — a "new historical bloc" of brain and manual workers, and the notion that the concept of a political party is "obsolete"; the body that condemned him is named and dated, the Nineteenth Congress of the French Communist Party in 1970; his opponent is quoted from an identified occasion, Waldeck Rochet at the FCP Central Committee plenum of October 1969, footnoted to L'Humanité; and the outcome is stated — expulsion. Ernst Fischer and Franz Marek get the same treatment, with their book Was Lenin wirklich sagte cited in a full footnote down to the publisher and the year, and their alleged claim quoted: that Marx "was primarily a theoretical thinker" while Lenin was at best "merely a strategist and tactician of the revolution". A reader who thought this unfair could go and read Fischer and Marek and decide. The book can produce a refutable accusation when it wants to.
Against "Left"-wing opportunism it produces nothing of the kind. Trotskyism has its own subsection and its own charge sheet, and there is not a document, an organisation, a date or a citation in it. The Fourth International, as noted, is never named. Trotsky himself is named four times, all four within a single passage, and no work of his is cited anywhere in the volume — although the passage refers to "the counter-revolutionary writings of Trotsky and his adherents", a category of writing large enough to be worth one title. The doctrinal charge is a single sentence: "Trotsky is known to have championed the idea of bypassing certain stages of the revolution." Known to whom, and from where, is not said. It happens to be answerable. Trotsky spent most of The Permanent Revolution (1930) on exactly that accusation, and wrote there that Lenin "in no way identified the permanent revolution with ignoring the peasantry or skipping over the agrarian revolution, as is the rule with the ignorant and unscrupulous epigones" — a book the reader of this volume cannot know exists. And where the Right-wing opportunists are convicted of stated propositions, the "Left" ones are convicted of an essence: neo-Trotskyism "covers up its ideological nakedness with ultra-Leftist verbiage", and "ultra-revolutionary phraseology is a typical feature of 'Left'-wing opportunism". Phraseology is not an act. Nothing could count against the claim, which is the point of putting it that way.
One of the book's specific charges is worth following, because it can be checked and it fails. The neo-Trotskyists, we are told, "reject the leading role of the working class in the revolution, and bank on sections that stand outside of production, such as college students, the jobless". The Fourth International's Ninth World Congress had adopted a resolution on precisely this question in 1969 — the year of the Meeting this book codifies — printed in the International Socialist Review for July–August 1969 under the title "The Worldwide Youth Radicalization and the Tasks of the Fourth International". It describes the student radicalisation as "a transmission belt speeding the development of a radical political consciousness among other social layers", and complains that "Many of the radical student currents failed to recognize, or denied, the decisive historic role of the working class and its revolutionary vanguard party". Whatever one makes of that resolution, it is the opposite of the position ascribed to it — refuted in print four years before this book went to press. Because no document is named, no reader of this book can find that out.
The second question — whether the category can ever run the other way — has a flatter answer. Six passages in the book put opportunism within a line or two of the CPSU, and in every one the Party is the physician rather than the patient: "The CPSU agrees with the position of the fraternal parties whose documents have drawn attention to the need to fight the danger of opportunism"; "The experience of the CPSU's struggle against anti-Leninist factions has shown that the danger of opportunism arises wherever it is not combated." Opportunism is something that happens to other parties, or to individuals inside other parties, and is then corrected by them; it has no purchase on the party that supplies the diagnosis. The same test applied to the Fourth International's own congress documents of December 1974 returns the other result. Those documents record a section's dated self-criticism — "The POR accepted that criticism in its self-criticism of April 1, 1972" — call one of that section's own leaders "the opportunist Lora" for having "effectively adapted to the Torres regime", and warn that cadres may "transmit into the Fourth International itself the pressures coming from a petty-bourgeois social origin". They call the policy of the two Indian Communist parties "ultraopportunist" and then say what they mean by it — "a policy of governmental collaboration, alliance with the possessing classes": named organisations, a specified behaviour, a claim one could go and test.
That is the difference, and it is not about the word. Both traditions used it. One of them could imagine it landing on itself.
There is a last piece of evidence about where this vocabulary came from, and it is unusually direct. In the closing weeks of 1971, a year or so before this book appeared, Ponomarev — signing under his rank as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee — published a twenty-one-page article in Kommunist no. 18 instructing theoretical and propagandist cadres "to profoundly lay bare the anti-Leninist essence of Trotskyism, its ideological and political kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions". The scare quotes around "left" are in the directive itself. Intercontinental Press of 24 January 1972 reported the article and translated the passage. Now turn to the contents page of the volume in your hands: chapter X, section 4, page 433, "The Ideological Kinship Between Right- and 'Left'-Wing Opportunism". The noun, the pairing and the punctuation, executed to order within about a year. What reads as doctrinal habit turns out to have a printed instruction behind it, issued by name.
And the name recurs. Progress's own front matter for The International Working-Class Movement — the seven-volume history whose third volume is the only book in this catalogue that uses opportunism harder than the one in your hands — opens with "The General Editorial Committee: B. N. Ponomarev, Chairman", identically worded in the volumes of 1980, 1981 and 1983. Progress advertised him in the back of volume 1 as "Secretary of the CC CPSU, Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences". So the man who told the cadres in 1971 what to expose, and in what words, is also the man whose name stands at the head of the committee that produced the flagship history executing it. That is not an inference about Soviet publishing. It is printed on the pages of the books themselves.
Worth noting where the book departs from its catalogue. Across the Progress volumes the right-wing variety of opportunism outnumbers the "left" by roughly three to two. Here it is the other way round: fifty-four uses of the "Left"-wing form against thirty-seven of the Right. That is what a book written for the world movement in 1973 looks like — the enemy is no longer social democracy but Peking and the far left, and the classifier has been turned around to face them.
A reader told that all of this is worthless learns nothing, and it is not worthless. Three things in it are genuinely useful.
First, the statistical and sociological material, which is the work of people with access to fraternal party returns and to serious labour statistics, and which is largely checkable against other sources. The count of parties over time (ten in 1918, thirty-four in 1921, sixty-one in 1935, eighty-nine at the time of writing, with a claimed membership of "almost 50 million"); the proportion of wage earners in the employed population of the developed capitalist countries in 1969–70; the frank note that across most of Western Europe socialist party membership exceeds communist membership, "the respective figures being 9,500,000 and 2,500,000". This is what the apparatus actually believed about the balance of forces, stated in numbers, and it is a valuable document for that reason alone.
Second, the Latin American chapter is real reporting. The account of Popular Unity in Chile — the 1952 and 1956 antecedents, the founding of the CUTCH in 1953, the FRAP, the composition of Allende's government, the local Popular Unity committees — is detailed, sourced to Luis Corvalán and Rodney Arismendi in the World Marxist Review, and substantially accurate. So is the survey of the Frente Amplio in Uruguay and of the Encuentro Nacional de los Argentinos, whose founding at Rosario on 21 November 1970 and whose leadership — Communists alongside Peronistas, People's Radicals and Christian Democrats — the book sets out accurately, and whose programme it cites to the Buenos Aires edition of 1969. (The text as digitised prints "Encuento"; a reader searching the correct Spanish will find nothing.) The book takes Latin American communism seriously as a subject rather than an illustration.
Third — and this is unexpected in a Moscow volume — the account of the 1969 Meeting admits its own failure. It records that the Communist Party of the Dominican Republic refused to adopt the concluding Document at all; that the Italian, San Marino, Australian and Réunion delegations endorsed only the anti-imperialist section; that Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Sudan and Morocco signed with reservations; and that the British and Norwegian parties signed only in part. That is a remarkably candid ledger of dissent for a book whose thesis is unity, and it tells the attentive reader more about the state of the movement in 1969 than the surrounding four hundred pages of affirmation.
There is also a defensible core to the book's treatment of the anti-fascist war. Its claim that the Communist International "rendered outstanding services to the cause by evolving the strategy and tactics for a united front of workers and the peoples of all lands, against fascism and war", and that this was "the basis for the unity of anti-fascist forces during World War II", is a fair description of what communists did in the Resistance in France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece, whatever one thinks of the policy that governed them afterwards. Communist parties supplied the largest and bravest single component of armed resistance to German occupation in Europe. That should be said plainly, and this book says it.
The reply to these arguments exists, in print, contemporaneously, and the archives that accompany this series hold much of it.
On the Sino-Soviet dispute, Livio Maitan's "Problems and Prospects of Our Time in the Mirror of the Sino-Soviet Polemics" appeared in Fourth International no. 11 (the archive used here holds no printed issue dates for that run; marxists.org files the piece to September 1960). It names both parties' positions, which this book does not. Maitan returned to the ground in the same journal, no. 13, with "A Revolutionary Criticism of the Theses of the Moscow Conference", a clause-by-clause reading of the resolution of the 1960 Meeting of eighty-one parties — the direct ancestor of the 1969 Document this volume codifies, and treated there as a text with arguments in it rather than an authority to be quoted. On China itself, Tom Kerry's "A Mao-Stalin Rift: Myth or Fact?" ran to twenty-two pages of the International Socialist Review for September–October 1969, the year of the Moscow Meeting; it works through the record of 1925–27 in detail, which is exactly what our volume's chronology-free polemic against Peking declines to do. On Czechoslovakia, Intercontinental Press carried the United Secretariat's "For a Government of Workers Councils in Czechoslovakia" on 13 May 1968, and, in the issue dated 2 September 1968, "End the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia!" and "Defend the Right of the Czechoslovak Workers and Peasants to Self-Determination!" On the framing of communists as agents, see the United Secretariat's declaration of 21 January 1970, "On the 'Trotskyite Plot' in Czechoslovakia" (IP, 9 February 1970), which observes that the criminal charges had been "rehashed from the Moscow trials". On the silence that is this book's method, IP of 13 March 1972, commenting on an admission by Gustáv Husák, noted of Soviet publications since 1956 that "the Moscow trials are not mentioned" — written a year before the volume in your hands went to press and describing it exactly.
On Yugoslavia, where our text has an erasure, see Ernest Mandel's "Tito and the Yugoslav Revolution" and, in the same IP issue of 31 March 1980, "International Brigades for Yugoslavia in 1950", which recovers what the 1948 break looked like to communists outside both apparatuses. On the Comintern cadres who vanish from this volume, the fortieth-anniversary assessment of the Fourth International (IP, 9 October 1978) lists by name the party founders and members of the Comintern's Executive Committee who went into opposition — Rakovsky, Preobrazhensky, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Nin, Andrade, Rosmer, Sneevliet, Pouliopoulos, Ta Thu Thau — and records that "nearly all were killed by the fascist, Stalinist, or imperialist terror".
And on the book's showpiece, there is an irony that no polemic could improve. The World Communist Movement presents Chile as the demonstration case for the peaceful road. While it was in production, Hugo Blanco was filing from Chile for Intercontinental Press: "Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile" on 7 May 1973, on the organisation of Patria y Libertad; "New Workers Bodies Challenge Reformists" on 18 June; "In the Aftermath of the Attempted Coup" on 10 September, on the rise of workers' combativity in Santiago after the abortive coup of 29 June. On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces bombarded the presidential palace, Allende died in it, and Corvalán — repeatedly quoted with approval in these pages, from his speeches to the 1969 Meeting and to the CPSU's Twenty-Fourth Congress — was imprisoned for three years. The United Secretariat's statement of 19 September, "Solidarity With the Chilean Workers!", ran in IP on 1 October 1973.
Read this book, then, not as a history of the world communist movement, which it never attempts to be, but as a full-dress statement of what the Soviet state wanted that movement to think in the year the Chilean road ended. Its silences are not gaps in the research. They are the argument.