This book announces its purpose in its subtitle. Most Progress Publishers volumes on Soviet institutions present themselves as description; Socialism and Democracy presents itself as combat. The Russian title page reads Sotsializm i demokratiya (Otvet opportunistam) — Socialism and Democracy: A Reply to Opportunists — and the running head repeats the second half on every page. It is a polemic, and it never pretends otherwise. That is worth registering at the outset, because a polemic can be held to a stricter standard than a survey. It has chosen its enemy, framed the question, and undertaken to win an argument on the merits. We may therefore ask whether it wins.
The two authors are named on the title page as B. N. Topornin and E. I. Machulsky (the English catalogue prints the second as "R. Machulsky"; the book's own front matter gives the initials E. I.). Boris Topornin was a Soviet jurist — one of his own footnotes here cites his article "Socialism and a Multi-Party System" in Soviet State and Law, no. 5, 1971, the flagship journal of the Soviet legal profession — and the constitutional and institutional chapters carry his hand. The book was translated by Nick Bobrov, edited by Murad Saifulin (who also edited this series' Soviet Socialist Democracy), and issued by Progress in Moscow in 1974.
For once the date on the spine can be trusted. There is no printing history in the front matter, no earlier edition announced in the text, and the latest events cited are all from 1970–71: the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU (1971), whose "developed socialism" doctrine the book everywhere assumes; the Eighth Congress of the East German SUPG at which Honecker spoke; the Tenth Hungarian Party Congress and Kádár's report; the 1971 Soviet elections; Topornin's own 1971 article. The manuscript closed around 1972–73 and reached English almost at once. This is a genuine document of 1974, not an older text in a newer jacket — which matters, because the year is the whole hinge of an honest reading.
In February 1974, as this book was being printed in English, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported to the West; The Gulag Archipelago was reaching foreign readers that same winter. Andrei Sakharov was under sustained public attack and would shortly be appealing for imprisoned colleagues. The mathematician Leonid Plyushch was held in a psychiatric prison-hospital. The samizdat Chronicle of Current Events, suppressed and revived, was cataloguing the arrests case by case. Prosecutions under articles 70 and 190 of the criminal code — "anti-Soviet agitation," the circulation of "fabrications" defaming the Soviet state — were the working practice of Soviet legality in the year of writing. This was the reality against which two Soviet authors sat down to demonstrate that their state embodied a higher and more genuine democracy than the "formal" bourgeois kind.
The book's central category is democracy understood as real popular power — the drawing of the whole people into the actual administration of society. That is precisely the thing the regime that commissioned it denied its own citizens. There is a test for such a book, and this series has come to rest its judgements on it rather than on word-counts or missing footnotes: error is admissible, the category is not. A Soviet book may freely concede that individual Communists blundered — a wrong policy, an excess, a mistaken emphasis — while never once allowing the analytic category it wields against its enemies to be turned on its own state. The two questions to put to Socialism and Democracy are therefore simple. Does the book's own definition of democracy — genuine popular power against merely formal rights — ever get pointed homeward, at a one-party state that permitted no opposition, no contested election, no free press, no independent union and no right to strike? And when it names the "dictatorship of the proletariat," does it ever entertain the possibility that this had become a dictatorship over the proletariat, a bureaucracy ruling in the workers' name?
This is not the export primer for a sympathetic Western reader that the earlier Soviet Socialist Democracy was. Its enemy is internal to the movement. The "opportunists" of the subtitle are the reform currents of the late 1960s: the Social-Democratic "third road" and "democratic socialism"; the theorists of "market socialism" who wanted the plan loosened and the enterprise freed; the Yugoslav advocates of workers' self-management, personified by the expelled Milovan Djilas; above all the Czechoslovak reform communists of 1968, whose "socialism with a human face" the book returns to again and again as the type-case of the danger. It is a book written to close a debate inside the ruling parties of the bloc — to prove that the models offered by these currents all "reproduce the capitalist political structure," and that the CPSU road is the only road. The worked examples carry the politics of the Warsaw Pact.
Its theoretical spine is the doctrine of "developed socialism" proclaimed under Brezhnev. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the book argues, having accomplished its historic task, "evolves into a political organisation of the whole people, with the working class remaining the guiding force." In the USSR this transition "lasted from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s"; the state "has grown over into … the state of the whole people." Hold on to that formula. It is the book's proudest claim and, as we shall see, its most vulnerable one, because it was anatomised in advance — thirty-eight years before this book appeared — by the man the book spends a chapter vilifying.
Give the book its due for nerve: unlike its predecessor in this series, it does not duck the hardest question. Soviet Socialist Democracy (1968) had staged the one-party objection as a doorstep query — "'But how can there be democracy when there is only one party?' the reader may ask" — and answered it defensively. Topornin and Machulsky devote a whole section, "Socialism and the Multi-Party System," to meeting it head-on, and their answer is more revealing than any evasion. "The idea of a political opposition," they write, "is incompatible with socialism, but not because Communists fear competition, as the adversaries of Marxism-Leninism maintain." Why, then? "The Communists are against the idea of establishing an opposition, because it would not have a social base and would not be supported by any classes." And the conclusion, stated without embarrassment: "If such a party were allowed freely to carry on its activities, it would disorganise social life, slow down and complicate socialist development."
There it is, in the open. The book's definition of democracy is the fullest possible participation of the masses in power; and in the same book, an opposition is banned because it might "disorganise social life." Democracy is invoked as a value and denied as a practice on facing pages. The book is even willing to concede the history plainly — "the multi-party system was abolished in [some countries] owing to the historical process and not to a 'communist conspiracy.' This was true of Soviet Russia" — which is an admission that in Russia the single party was abolished into being, not arrived at by any democratic act. The elections that remain are described with pride: "In the Soviet Union, 99.89 per cent of the electorate voted in the 1971 elections to the republican Supreme Soviets." No contested contest is anywhere described in the volume, because there was none to describe; a figure of 99.89 per cent is not a measure of participation but of its abolition.
Now the second question — the dictatorship turned inward — and here the book does something extraordinary. It quotes the charge, in full, from a critic, and then waves it away. The Austrian communist Franz Marek is allowed to state the Trotskyist and left-communist case exactly: "All power is being concentrated in the Party leadership's hands, i.e., instead of power being in the hands of the working class, the latter is in the hands of Party power.… Instead of being the ruling class, it is again becoming a means of manipulation." That is the whole indictment — the bureaucracy rules in the workers' name — set down by the book's own hand. Its reply is a single sentence: "Reality, however, refutes such allegations." No evidence follows; the refutation is the assertion. The category that the book applies without limit to bourgeois society — that behind formal power lies real powerlessness — is raised against the Soviet state, named, and then declared inadmissible by fiat.
The book will admit error of a certain managed kind. It concedes that in Soviet Russia "we had to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat in its harshest form" (quoting Lenin) and that "repressive measures" were taken; the concession is folded into a justification, the harshness attributed entirely to the ferocity of the class enemy. What it will never do is let the concept of unaccountable power settle on the CPSU. Across the book the Party is only ever the subject combating deformation, never its object. That asymmetry — not any single falsehood — is the finding.
The Prague Spring of 1968 was the most serious attempt in the bloc's history to build the very thing this book claims already to embody: a socialism that was also a democracy, "socialism with a human face." It was crushed by Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks in August 1968, six years before this book went to press. One might expect a volume on socialist democracy to be silent about it, as this series has learned to expect silence about the awkward. It is not silent. It names 1968 repeatedly — and inverts it completely.
The reform communists become "Right-wing forces" who "openly attacked the socialist system in an effort to destroy the people's revolutionary gains." Their programme of a two-party system and a loyal opposition becomes a plot by "technocrats and intellectuals" to install an "elite technocratic representative democracy" over the heads of the workers. And the invasion itself is rendered in the language that the whole bloc adopted for it: the counter-revolution was defeated, the book says, thanks to "the healthy core of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the international assistance rendered by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries." Half a million troops and the end of an elected leadership's reforms are "international assistance." A book arguing that socialist democracy is real popular power describes the military suppression of a popular reform movement as the rescue of democracy from its enemies. No sentence in the volume states its actual logic more clearly.
Because it is a "reply to opportunists," the book must supply a genealogy of error, and Trotsky is cast as its fountainhead. He is "one of its first theorists" of "Left revisionism"; he wished to "'governmentalise' the trade unions, 'merge' them with the state and introduce military discipline in them"; for him "the peasantry was … the workers' enemy and, therefore, the state should be strengthened through ruining the peasants"; and his "adventurist spirit" is made the source of Maoism.
Fairness requires a distinction here, because part of this is not invented. In the trade-union controversy of 1920–21, and in Terrorism and Communism (1920), Trotsky did argue for the statification of the unions and the militarisation of labour under War Communism; the book's charge on that narrow point rests on a real text and a real position, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the use made of it is a fabrication of a familiar kind. "Ruining the peasants" is a gross distortion of the theory of permanent revolution, whose actual content is a worker–peasant alliance under proletarian leadership, not war on the peasantry; the line of descent to Maoism is polemical invention; and the whole procedure quietly performs the amalgam this series keeps meeting — taking the most authoritarian moment of an opponent's career and making it his essence. The deeper dishonesty is one of selection. The Trotsky the regime actually feared, and had had assassinated in 1940, was not the Trotsky of 1920 but the Trotsky of 1936 — the author of the most powerful indictment ever written of exactly the bureaucratic coercion this book was published to defend. That Trotsky does not appear. He could not be allowed to, because he had already refuted the book.
The same inversion governs the book's other historical set-pieces. Hungary in 1956 appears only as a "reactionar[y]" attempt to "revive Trotsky's scheme" and set "workers' councils" against "the bodies of people's power" — the workers' councils of the Hungarian revolution recast as a counter-revolutionary device. The pattern is consistent: wherever workers or reform communists tried to take power into their own hands against the apparatus, the book files it under counter-revolution.
A reader told that everything here is worthless learns nothing, and it would not be true. The book's underlying critique of purely formal democracy is a serious argument with a long and honourable Marxist pedigree, and it is not answered by indignation. When Topornin and Machulsky write that bourgeois democracy is "inconsistent, imperfect, limited," that "the economic power of the capitalists … gives them political power," that formal equality "proves to be a lie and hypocrisy in a bourgeois society" because "only the ruling class can really enjoy democratic rights and freedoms" — they are saying something true, and something the revolutionary socialist movement said long before there was a Soviet Union and says still. Political equality that coexists with economic domination is a thin thing; the freedom of the press is, in large measure, the freedom of those who own presses. Revolutionary Marxists make this case too. The book even credits bourgeois democracy with its historical achievement: it "played a progressive role," it "created parliament and introduced universal suffrage, local government and courts by jury."
The trouble is not that this instrument is blunt. It is that it is sharp, and only ever pointed one way. The critique of formal democracy is real, and it is here performing a theft — a genuine argument about the hollowness of capitalist democracy pressed into service to launder a state that had abolished contested elections, independent unions, a free press and the right to strike (the word "strike" in this book denotes only what workers do under capitalist governments). That is the bait-and-switch on which the whole volume runs: establish that formal rights can mask real powerlessness, then forbid anyone to ask whether Soviet rights did the same.
The answer the book cannot give had been in print, from within Marxism, since 1936. In The Revolution Betrayed, written in the months the Stalin Constitution was being drafted, Trotsky examined the exact doctrine this book proclaims — the passage from the dictatorship of the proletariat to a "state of the whole people" — and named it "the fundamental sophism of the official doctrine." The new constitution's move from class-based to universal suffrage was, he wrote, "a matter … of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat": where the book celebrates that formula as democracy fulfilled, Trotsky saw the dissolution of a class "in 'the nation' politically, long before it is economically dissolved in society" — a formula that identified "the bureaucracy with the state, and the state with the people" (ch. 10, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution"). His verdict on the equality the book advertises is the one sentence that answers the whole volume: "The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy."
And on the single party, Trotsky had already answered the precise argument Topornin and Machulsky make. Their claim that an opposition can be banned because it "would not have a social base" is Bukharin's claim of 1936 — "partisans of the hostile liquidated classes organized in parties cannot be permitted" — which Trotsky quoted and demolished in the same chapter: "the existing political differences are far from comprised in the alternative: to socialism or to capitalism. There are other questions: How go toward socialism, with what tempo, etc. … If the nourishing soil for political parties has really disappeared, then there is no reason to forbid them." The prohibition of an opposition, on this reading, is not evidence that classes have withered but evidence that a bureaucracy fears the discontent it has generated — "its rabid insistence upon strangling all criticism." Against a state that called itself the rule of the whole people, Trotsky's conclusion was not despair but a demand for the restoration of Soviet democracy through a political revolution against the caste that had usurped it — the argument this series treats as the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society must be read.
But The Revolution Betrayed is a critique, and a critique can be waved off as merely negative — the complaint of a defeated man with nothing to put in the place of what he attacks. The book's challenge is constructive: it insists that socialist democracy means the single party, that opposition is "incompatible with socialism," and it dares its opponents to say what else socialist democracy could be. The tradition Trotsky founded took up exactly that dare, and answered it not with liberalism but with a more thoroughgoing socialist democracy than anything in Topornin and Machulsky's pages. Its mature statement is a formal programmatic document: Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Socialist Democracy, drafted by Ernest Mandel and adopted by the Eleventh (1979) and, in revised form, the Twelfth (1985) World Congresses of the Fourth International. It postdates the 1974 book, and is offered here as the tradition's considered answer rather than a contemporaneous one — but its target is precisely the doctrine this volume defends. Against the claim that a single party expresses the unity of a classless society, the resolution states flatly: "In no way does the Marxist theory of the state entail the concept that a one-party system is a necessary precondition or feature of workers' power, a workers' state, or the dictatorship of the proletariat." No such proposal, it observes, appears anywhere in Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky; the one-party doctrine is a later Stalinist invention, serving only as "apologies for the monopoly of political power usurped by the Soviet bureaucracy." And its positive counter-position is the exact inverse of the book's — genuine workers' power requires the plurality the book forbids: "Without full freedom to organise political groups, tendencies, and parties, no full flowering of democratic rights and freedoms for the toiling masses is possible under the dictatorship of the proletariat." The real choice, the resolution holds, is between "genuine workers' democracy" with "freedom of political organisation of all those who abide by the soviet constitution in practice (including those who do not ideologically support the soviet system)" and "a decisive restriction of these political rights of the working class itself." Where the book offers workers' councils or a plurality of parties and files the second under bourgeois deviation, the resolution demands workers' councils and the freedom of tendencies, press and organisation, and treats any curtailment of that freedom as a restriction not of the class enemy's rights but of "the political rights of the proletariat." This is the answer the subtitle invites and cannot survive: the charge that its opponents were "opportunists" smuggling capitalism back in is met, from within revolutionary Marxism and in a congress resolution, by a programme more democratic than the book's own.
The reality the book omits was, in 1974, arriving weekly in the press of the tradition Trotsky founded. As these pages went to English, Intercontinental Press carried "Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago'" on the cover of its first issue of the year (vol. 12, no. 1, 14 January 1974), "Solzhenitsyn in Exile" a month later on his deportation (vol. 12, no. 7, 25 February 1974), and "Yevtushenko's Defense of Solzhenitsyn" the week after (vol. 12, no. 8, 4 March 1974), while tracking the campaign around Plyushch and the punitive-psychiatry cases through the spring. The two bodies of print describe the same state in the same year and do not touch at a single point. One calls it the highest democracy in history; the other reports, case by case, what that democracy did to citizens who spoke.
It is a striking confirmation of the reflexivity test that this book and its exact contemporary in this series — Vladimir Tumanov's Contemporary Bourgeois Legal Thought, also Progress, also 1974 — fall silent at the very same point. Neither names Solzhenitsyn; neither names the Chronicle; neither names the psychiatric hospitals; both were written by able men who had the facts and a professional reason to engage them. Tumanov could see the class content of an American loyalty statute and not the Serbsky Institute. Topornin and Machulsky can see the hollowness of a bourgeois election and not a 99.89-per-cent turnout. The blindness is not a failure of intelligence. It is the one thing the category was built never to see.
Read the book, then, for what it honestly is: the sharpest official statement available in English of how the Soviet state argued its own democratic superiority at the precise moment — Solzhenitsyn on the plane to Frankfurt, the Chronicle counting the arrests — when that argument became impossible to sustain. The authors chose the ground and framed the question. On their own terms, and by their own definition of democracy, they lose.