Races and Peoples is, over most of its length, a good book, and any honest introduction to it has to begin by saying so. It is a collection of essays by working scholars of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnography — physical anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, a philosopher, a sociologist and a legal specialist — drawn from the Institute's yearbook Rasy i narody (Races and Peoples), which had begun to appear in 1971, together with several pieces written specially for this English edition. It carries the date 1974 and the line "© Progress Publishers 1974," and unlike many titles in this series its text and its spine agree: the latest events it cites are of 1970–72 (the Israeli citizenship law of March 1970, the Angela Davis trial, Brezhnev's speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR in December 1972), and it reads like a book of the early 1970s. It was edited by I. R. Grigulevich, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and S. Y. Kozlov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, and it was made for export: Progress produced it in English for "the foreign reader," to show the decolonising and Western world what Soviet science had to say about race and nation at the high-water mark of détente, when the Soviet Union presented itself to the newly independent states of Africa and Asia as the great anti-racist and anti-colonial power. On the terrain it chooses, it makes that case well. On the terrain it refuses to enter, it tells a lie by silence so large that it organises the whole book — and the man whose name stands first on the title page gives that silence a biography.
The scientific core of Races and Peoples is sound, and for 1974 it was valuable. Its opening section, "Problems of Theory," contains real physical anthropology by N. N. Cheboksarov and V. P. Alexeyev, and it dismantles biological racism at the root. Alexeyev treats the races of humankind not as fixed types arranged in a ladder but as populations — clines of gene frequencies shaped by migration, adaptation and interbreeding, dividing humanity along axes (an eastern Australoid-Mongoloid branch and a western Negroid-Europeoid one) that cut clean across the old colour hierarchy. The book states the anti-racist principle plainly. "The basis of every racist theory," it writes, "is the pseudo-scientific and essentially reactionary concept that there are clear-cut physical and psychical distinctions between races, and that hereditary causes are responsible for these distinctions, which allegedly enable one to identify those groups of mankind which are full-fledged or inferior physically and psychically." Against this it insists that the psychological traits racism assigns to "inferior races" — "industriousness, patriotism, courage and purposefulness" — "are, after all, common to all mankind." It even keeps its logic honest against its own side, noting that racism "arises from the idea of the inequality of races and not from recognition of racial distinctions," so that acknowledging that human populations differ physically does not open the door to hierarchy. This is the mainstream anti-racist anthropology of its day — the science of the UNESCO statements on race — argued with competence.
It is argued, moreover, against a live and named opponent. When the book turns to the American attempt to give racism a scientific mask, it attacks a Professor of Psychology "at the University of California" who set out to prove "that, owing to genetic peculiarities, Negroes were very backward in intellectual ability as compared with white men" — a man the scan mangles into "A. Jehkson" but who is unmistakably Arthur Jensen of Berkeley, whose 1969 article on race and IQ was, in 1974, the most fiercely contested claim in the field. The book is right to demolish it, and right to note that such "science" was welcomed in high political places. Its anti-apartheid chapter, A. V. Butlitsky's "South Africa: The Explosion Must Come," is detailed and accurate: it walks through the Group Areas Act (quoting Malan's description of it as "the nucleus of the apartheid policy"), the Pass Laws, the Bantustans into which millions were being driven, and the Suppression of Communism Act that banned the SACP, the ANC and the Indian Congress. Its treatment of Black America is unsentimental and, in places, sharp — it quotes Lenin's "Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes!", it honours Angela Davis, and it makes the genuinely acute observation that the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s was riddled with exemptions, the 1964 Civil Rights Act sparing small employers, private colleges and much else. None of this was cynical in the way a reader schooled only on Soviet mendacity might expect. Soviet anti-racism reached real people — it armed anti-colonial movements, it gave the American civil-rights and Black-liberation struggles an international echo, and the anthropology it published to refute racial hierarchy was, and is, correct science. A reader told that everything in this book is worthless would be misled. Most of it is not.
The book's trouble begins where its science ends and its politics start — specifically, in the long central section on "National Problems and Ethnic Processes," where the Soviet Union is presented not as a country with a national question but as the country that has solved it. Here the register changes from anthropology to liturgy. The USSR is "a multi-national state of a new kind, a living embodiment of the ideas of proletarian internationalism"; thanks to "the consistent implementation of the Leninist national policy," it has achieved "the all-round progress and flourishing prosperity of all the nations and nationalities living in the USSR." The two official watchwords — rastsvet i sblizhenie, the "flowering" of nations and their "drawing together" — run through the section as a refrain: the CPSU Programme's "multi-lateral development and flourishing of nations and, on the other, the drawing together of socialist nations." Brezhnev is quoted at length on "the indissoluble unity and friendship of all the nations," and out of this drawing-together a wholly new thing is said to have been born, "a qualitatively new historical community, the Soviet people."
Now apply the test that matters most for a book like this: not how often it uses a word, nor even whom it deigns to quote, but whether the category it wields against others could ever, by its own definition, be turned on the speaker. The category here is national oppression, and the book turns it with real force on South Africa, on the American South, on Israel, on the colonial powers. It never once turns it homeward — and the home to which it declines to turn it had, within the living memory of every adult reader in 1974, done something for which "national oppression" is far too mild a word.
Between 1941 and 1944 the Soviet state deported entire nations. The Volga Germans lost their autonomous republic and were removed to Siberia and Kazakhstan in the late summer of 1941; the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Crimean Tatars and the Meskhetian Turks followed between the autumn of 1943 and the end of 1944, loaded onto cattle-trucks nation by nation and dumped in Central Asia and Siberia, where a large fraction — the estimates run to a quarter and more for some peoples — died of cold, hunger and typhus in the first years. Their autonomous republics were abolished and wiped from the map. And in 1974, when this book appeared, the Crimean Tatars were still forbidden to return to Crimea, sixteen years after Khrushchev had restored most of the others: a nation held in exile, as a nation, by the state whose "Leninist nationalities policy" the book celebrates as a model for the world.
Does Races and Peoples mention any of this? It does not. Search the text and the result is a flat, total silence. "Crimea" and "Crimean Tatars": nil. "Chechen," "Kalmyk," "Karachai," "Balkar," "Volga German," "Meskhetian": nil. The word "deport" occurs exactly once in the whole book — describing how the apartheid authorities "deport various racial groups" under the Group Areas Act. The word "resettlement" occurs describing apartheid South Africa's Bantustans and colonial Sudan's forced tribal removals. The vocabulary of ethnic cleansing is present and correct; it is simply pointed, without exception, away from Moscow. The Ingush are named once — in a roll of grateful peoples who, the book says, "had no written languages at all" until "these were only devised in Soviet times." The Ingush, that is, appear in this book solely as a trophy of Soviet enlightenment, thirty years after the Soviet state packed them into trains and abolished their republic. That is the reflexivity test failing not by accident but by design.
The single sharpest instance is quiet, and a reader could pass it without noticing the enormity underneath. Discussing the "amalgamation" of Soviet peoples, the book reports, as evidence of healthy "drawing together," that "while the 1926 census distinguishes 194 nationalities, the 1959 census showed only 109, the 1970 census only 104 ethnonyms." Ninety nationalities, on this telling, have melted contentedly into their larger neighbours through "consolidation, assimilation and inter-national integration." But some of those peoples did not amalgamate; they were deported, their names struck from the census because their nations had been struck from the administrative map. The statistical disappearance the book offers as a proof of fraternity is, in part, the paper trace of the deportations it cannot name. The falsification is not a stray sentence. It is the interpretive frame — voluntary, lawlike "merging" — laid over a history that included the forcible uprooting of whole peoples, so that the reader sees only the arithmetic and never the cattle-trucks.
The same structure governs the book's handling of antisemitism, and here it connects to the specific state campaign that produced it. Races and Peoples devotes its closing section, "Against Racialism," to unmasking the enemy's varieties of race-hatred, and prominent among them — named as a standing assignment for Soviet scholarship — is Zionism. "The unmasking of all forms of racialism, including their Zionist variety," the book declares, "is one of the tasks of Marxist-Leninist science." Israel is presented as a racialist state built on "purity of blood" and the "chosen nation" myth; the historic Jewish workers' Bund is condemned, through Lenin, for basing itself "on the Zionist idea of a special Jewish nation, a completely false and reactionary idea."
This is not free-standing scholarship. It is the academic, footnoted face of the "anti-Zionist" campaign the Soviet state launched after the Six-Day War of 1967, whose raw founding text — Yuri Ivanov's Caution: Zionism! (Progress, 1970) — is itself a volume in this series, and whose respectable middle register was Galina Nikitina's The State of Israel (Progress, 1973). Ivanov's book, as the introduction to it in this series argues, is in substance an antisemitic tract that revives the fantasy of a secret Jewish world power in Marxist costume. Races and Peoples is the same campaign wearing a lab coat: it takes the legitimate object — criticism of Zionism as a political movement — and, by filing it under "racialism" alongside apartheid and the Klan, lends the state's anti-Jewish drive the authority of the Academy of Sciences.
And when the book approaches the charge that might rebound on the USSR — the charge of antisemitism itself — it performs the same swerve as with the deportations. It acknowledges the word only to expel it from Soviet soil: antisemitism, it insists, is as alien to the socialist system as any other form of racism, and the accusation that the USSR practises it is dismissed as a stale propaganda trick of the Israeli aggressors. Antisemitism, in this book, is a crime of Hitler's Germany (the Nuremberg laws are described with care) and a crime of Zionist Israel — never a fact of Soviet life. Yet the Soviet reader of 1974 lived in the aftermath of the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign of Stalin's last years, the murder of the Yiddish writers, the Doctors' Plot of 1953; and lived in the present tense of a regime that was jailing Jewish activists, obstructing emigration, and branding Jewish national feeling as treason on behalf of a hostile foreign power. On all of this the book that has so much to say about the treatment of Jews in Israel says precisely nothing. The category — racism, national and religious persecution — is available, sharpened, and aimed everywhere except at the one address where the author could have checked it against the evidence out his window.
The book anticipates the obvious objection and rebuts it by name. The processes of drawing-together, it says, "have nothing in common with the fabrications disseminated by certain bourgeois 'Sovietologists' about a supposed drive to 'Russify' the non-Russian peoples of the USSR." Russification, in Races and Peoples, is a sin of the tsars — the book quotes with contempt the tsarist education minister Count D. A. Tolstoy's declaration that the purpose of educating the minorities was "unquestionably to Russify them" — and the implication is that with the autocracy the thing itself was buried. That the Russian language spread across Soviet public life is admitted and praised; that this spread might be coerced is ruled out in advance, with Lenin conscripted as a witness for the voluntary character of it all.
The reply to this was written, from within the revolutionary-Marxist tradition, four decades before the book and by a man some of whose comrades this book's lead editor had helped to hunt down. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky devoted a section of his chapter on Soviet society, "Nationality and Culture," to exactly this question, and his verdict is the precise negative of the book's. The flowering of national cultures under the bureaucracy, he wrote, is a hollow show: the "Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Turk newspapers and books are only translations of the bureaucratic imperative into the language of the corresponding nationality." And the drawing-together, so far from being the free convergence of equals, wears a specific and ugly face — "bureaucratism inevitably takes the color of an autocratic Russification, leaving to the other nationalities the sole indubitable cultural right of celebrating the arbiter in their own language." Where Races and Peoples sees sblizhenie, Trotsky saw a police club held over the cultural life of all the peoples of the Union, beginning with the Russians themselves.
Two honesties are owed here. The first is that Trotsky wrote in 1936, before the deportations, so his book cannot be cited as a witness to those; for them the record itself, and the contemporary reply below, must carry the weight. The second is more interesting: on the science, Trotsky and this book agree. "How stupid is the theory of unchanging racial types in the light of the events of our epoch!" he wrote in the same section, welcoming the mixing of Soviet nationalities and mocking "the mysticism of the 'Slavic soul.'" The quarrel between the anti-Stalinist tradition and Races and Peoples is not over whether races form a hierarchy — both deny it — nor over whether nations can and should draw together. It is over the single question the book is built to suppress: whether the drawing-together in the USSR was the voluntary movement of free peoples, or something done to them, at times at gunpoint, by a state that then wrote the deported out of the census and called the remainder a family.
For the events the book erases, the tradition this series speaks from was not silent, and it did not need forty years' hindsight. The Fourth International's weekly, Intercontinental Press, was covering in real time precisely the movements Races and Peoples cannot see. Its report on the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU — the very congress whose resolutions this book quotes as proof of fraternal harmony — put the matter directly. "The continued forced exile of the Crimean Tatars," it noted, "has been the cause of a series of protests," to which "the reaction of the 5,000 congress delegates was to proclaim approval of a paternalistic Great Russian chauvinism obligatory for all party members" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 9, no. 16, 26 April 1971). While Grigulevich and Kozlov's contributors were preparing the yearbook that became this book, the press of the opposing tradition was reporting, from the same Soviet sources and the same year, the exiled nation the book would not name and the "Great Russian chauvinism" whose existence the book flatly denied. Across the early 1970s the same journal followed the Crimean Tatar return movement and the Soviet-Jewish emigration movement issue after issue. The information was not unavailable in 1974. It was declined.
There remains the matter of the editor, and it is not a rhetorical flourish but a documented fact that belongs on the record of this particular book. I. R. Grigulevich — Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (1913–1988), whose "D. Sc. (Hist.)" the title page duly notes — did not begin as a scholar. He was, from 1937 to 1953, an operative of the Soviet secret police, and among the most consequential. In Spain during the Civil War, under the NKVD general Alexander Orlov, he helped organise the "mobile groups" that hunted down anti-Stalinist revolutionaries, including the POUM leader Andreu Nin. And on 24 May 1940, in Mexico City, Grigulevich was one of the leaders — with the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros — of the first armed assault on the house of Leon Trotsky at Coyoacán, the machine-gun raid that riddled the bedroom walls, failed to kill Trotsky, and left the young American guard Robert Sheldon Harte abducted and murdered. Three months later a second assassin finished the work Grigulevich's raid had begun. Only afterwards did Grigulevich reinvent himself as a Soviet Latin-Americanist and historian of religion (publishing under the name I. Lavretsky), take his doctorate in 1960, join the Institute of Ethnography that produced Rasy i narody, and rise to corresponding membership of the Academy of Sciences.
So the lead editor of this warm-hearted anthology on the brotherhood of the world's peoples, this scientific refutation of the idea that some human beings are worth less than others, was a man who had personally taken part in an attempt to murder Trotsky and in the machinery that murdered the leadership of the POUM. It would be cheap to rest the book's assessment on its editor's crimes, and I do not. The science in these pages is real whoever signed off on the volume; the anti-apartheid chapter is true; the demolition of Jensen is correct. But the coincidence is not merely lurid. It is the whole argument of this introduction compressed into a single career. The same state that could publish, sincerely, a sound and humane science against racial hierarchy could staff its scholarly institutes with the men who had liquidated its revolutionary opponents, and could count on those institutes to apply the category of national oppression to every country on earth but the one that had deported eight nations and would not let one of them go home. The book is the science and the silence at once, and Grigulevich is the sign that they were never in tension. They were the same establishment, doing both.
Read Races and Peoples, then, for what it honestly contains: as competent physical anthropology, as a genuine document of Soviet anti-colonial solidarity, and as the best available evidence — in what it cannot bring itself to say, and in whose name it says it — of the difference between opposing racism abroad and permitting it at home.