Chapter Four of this book contains a section called "Some Aspects of the Activities of Anti-Communist Centres." It is a catalogue: the Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe, the Radio Liberty Committee, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Columbia's Research Institute on Communist Affairs under Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Russian Research Centre founded at Harvard in 1948 on Carnegie money, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the West German Ostforschung network, the British Council, the BBC and the London School of Economics. Then, having worked through the capitalist great powers, the authors write a single sentence to cover the rest of the world:
There are anti-communist centres in other countries, the most prominent being the Socialist International and the Fourth, Trotskyist, International.
That sentence is the book in miniature, and it is the reason to read it. The Fourth International in 1976 was an organisation of a few thousand cadre with no state, no intelligence service, no endowment and no transmitter. It is placed here, without argument, in the same list as the Hoover Institution — because the category "anti-communism," as this book uses it, is not a description of who funds you or what you want. It is a description of the effect your criticism is said to have. Everything else in the volume follows from that operation, and the volume is worth preserving because it performs the operation more openly than any other Progress title of the period.
Contemporary Anti-Communism: Policy and Ideology is not a monograph and has no author. Its front matter lists twenty-one contributing authors — V. Artyomov, E. Batalov, V. Mshvenieradze, Y. Zamoshkin and others, alongside G. Langendorf, A. Loesdau, W. Paff, U. Plener, O. Reinhold, K.-H. Schwank and J. Vogeler, a set of names that marks this as a joint Soviet–East German production — and an editor of the Russian text, G. Parkhomenko. No institute is named for any of them; no preface explains the commission; the English edition simply announces that it is "Translated from the Russian." Eight chapters run from imperialism's political strategy through the economics of socialism, "communism studies" in the West, ideological subversion against the USSR, neocolonialism, opportunism in the working-class movement, petty-bourgeois ideology, and the propaganda of the American way of life.
The date on the title page is misleading. The book's evidence stops moving in 1973. There are exactly three references to 1974 and two to 1975, all of them statistical series; the American bicentennial is discussed as something "coming, in 1976." Spain and Portugal are still listed as seats of anti-communism, though the Portuguese dictatorship had fallen in April 1974 and Franco had been dead for months when this went to press. The Helsinki Final Act — signed in August 1975, the single most important event for the argument this book is making — is not mentioned. The only occurrence of the word "Helsinki" refers to a Socialist International conference held there in 1971. What the English reader of 1976 received was a text closed around 1974 and shipped, unrevised, into a year whose politics it had not seen.
Take the reporting seriously first, because a good deal of it is accurate, and a reader who assumes Soviet books simply invent their enemies will be corrected here. Anti-communism was an organised industry with budgets and buildings. The Hoover Institution was founded in 1919 and did function as a research and publishing centre for the cause. The Columbia institute existed and Brzezinski ran it. The great foundations did fund Soviet studies on a scale no other field enjoyed. The Free Europe Committee did run Radio Free Europe and did solicit money as though it were a charity. Chapter Five's account of Chile is right in its essentials — that Washington preferred "a combination of economic, ideological and political means of pressure in order to prepare and accomplish an internal counter-revolutionary coup," and that "the Right-wing, pro-fascist elements in Chile were co-ordinated and directed by special agencies of the Pentagon and the CIA." The US Senate's own Church Committee had published its staff report on covert action in Chile in December 1975. And the book is not wrong that the language of anti-communism was used domestically against people who were not communists: it notes the "unqualified support for anti-communist legislation, the actions of the Un-American Activities Committee, the persecution of progressive organisations." It even opens with an attribution worth keeping — that Thomas Mann "called anti-communism the most colossal absurdity of our epoch."
So it is remarkable how badly the book documents the case it could have won. In roughly 103,000 words on anti-communism, the letters CIA appear twice. Once for Chile; once for émigré organisations in West Germany. The section on the Free Europe Committee says its budget "amounts to about 15 million dollars" and that it "is financed by the monopolies" — and never mentions the Central Intelligence Agency at all. This was not a secret being protected. The CIA's funding of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had been forced into the open in the American press, disclosed on the Senate floor by Clifford Case in January 1971, and formally ended by Congress, which moved the radios onto an open appropriation. Georgi Arbatov's own Progress volume of 1973, The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations, had stated flatly that the direction of the Free Europe Committee "is in the hands of the US State Department and the CIA." Three years later this book retreated to "the monopolies."
The pattern extends. Joseph McCarthy is not named. Neither is the Hollywood blacklist, the Smith Act prosecutions, the Rosenbergs, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or Encounter. A 103,000-word study of anti-communism as a state-organised enterprise omits the episode that gave anti-communism its name in English and the cultural apparatus whose exposure in 1966–67 had been the propaganda gift of the decade. The omissions are not accidental and they are not ideological squeamishness. They are a matter of where the book's attention actually goes. Roger Garaudy is discussed on twenty-four occasions and Ernst Fischer on twenty-five; Herbert Marcuse on ten. Solzhenitsyn appears exactly once in the entire book, and not as a subject — only as a text that Garaudy had the impertinence to cite. Sakharov does not appear at all. The book is not primarily about the American right. It is about the left.
Chapter Six, "Anti-Communism and Opportunism in the Working-Class Movement," is where the machinery is exposed. Its first section is headed "Revisionism in the Service of Anti-Communism," and it treats the Fischer–Marek group in Austria, the Garaudy group in France and "the revisionists in Czechoslovakia in 1968" as three national expressions of one phenomenon, whose "common language" was anti-Sovietism. The governing sentence is elsewhere, in Chapter Four:
The same objective is pursued by the attacks on the CPSU, its policies and the experience of the USSR by the Right and "Left" revisionists, Trotskyists, renegades of communism and the Peking "theorists". Their anti-Sovietism dovetails with imperialist anti-Soviet propaganda, with anti-communism, and objectively serves the interests of imperialism.
The load-bearing word is objectively. No collusion has to be shown, no funding traced, no agreement demonstrated. It is enough that a criticism, once uttered, can be quoted by an enemy. The book is candid that this is the test, and applies it consistently. Trotskyism is filed twice: as an anti-communist centre in Chapter Four and as an "ultra-Left" variant of anti-communism throughout, "Left-radical — Trotskyist, Maoist and other — 'ultra-revolutionary' elements, whose principal aims are to slander the Communist parties." Yugoslav self-management appears once, in scare quotes, as the model to which revisionists appeal when they propose "abolishing the socialist states as quickly as possible." Czechoslovak reform communism is not a tendency but a crisis, the authorities cited being the CPC plenum of December 1970 and the Lessons of the Crisis Development, the document produced by the leadership installed after the invasion. Eurocommunism has no name here — the word had barely been coined — but Chapter Six is the brief against it, drafted in advance. The one place the book allows a gradient is the New Left, which it treats as recoverable: "this movement signified a shift to the Left," and where communists could free its participants "of their anti-communist prejudices," the majority "began gravitating toward a union with the working-class movement." Even the generosity is instrumental. The New Left is worth saving because it might be absorbed.
Now the silences, which are the finding.
The name Stalin occurs six times. Four of those are inside the phrases "the Stalin personality cult" and "'Stalinism'," and every one of them appears in order to condemn someone else for invoking it. Garaudy "slanderously identified the epochal achievements of this struggle with the negative consequences of the Stalin personality cult." Wolfgang Leonhard's revisionism "absolutises the negative consequences of the Stalin personality cult." Anti-communist propaganda "plays on the CPSU's criticism of the personality cult." Nowhere does the book say what those consequences were. The reader is told repeatedly that the measure others apply to the terror is excessive, and is never told the quantity being measured. The year 1937 does not appear. The Moscow Trials do not appear. Not one of the defendants, not one of the shot generals, not one of the returned prisoners is named. Hungary in 1956 is mentioned twice, both times as "the counter-revolutionary rising" — and the Soviet army's entry into Budapest is not mentioned; instead John Foster Dulles is credited with declining to intervene. Czechoslovakia is named twenty-eight times without the book ever recording that five armies crossed its border in August 1968. There is no Soviet invasion anywhere in this book. There is only "the collapse of the imperialist plans in Czechoslovakia in 1968."
Nor is there anyone inside the Soviet Union who disagrees with the Soviet government. The words dissident, censorship, jamming and samizdat do not occur once. The one engagement with the subject is a passage attacking "the Western propaganda campaign under the hypocritical slogan of 'protecting human rights' in socialist countries," whose real aim, the authors write, is "the liquidation of the actual achievements of socialism." That was published in English in 1976, the year the Moscow Helsinki Group was founded by Soviet citizens asking their government to keep an agreement it had signed.
One passage should be named without euphemism. The catalogue of American anti-communist centres, having listed Hoover and Columbia and Harvard, continues: "The innumerable Zionist organisations in the USA are also helping to devise anti-communist strategy and spread anti-communist propaganda," and identifies the United Jewish Appeal, the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organisation as instruments of anti-Soviet propaganda. Chapter Five adds that the ideological equipment of pro-imperialist regimes "consists of white and coloured racism and also of Zionism." This appeared months after the UN General Assembly's resolution of November 1975, and it belongs to the Soviet "anti-Zionist" campaign of the 1970s, whose function inside the USSR was not the criticism of Israeli policy — a legitimate object — but the supply of a permitted vocabulary for something else. Readers of a book that spends eight chapters explaining how enemies disguise themselves should be told when its authors are doing it.
The reply was being made, in print, in the very months this book reached English-language readers, and it was not a defence of anybody's intelligence service. In Intercontinental Press of 26 July 1976, David Frankel reviewed Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich and called it "a fabrication and a dreary smear-job from beginning to end," taking apart in particular the revival of the 1917 slander that the Bolsheviks were German agents. The Fourth International, in other words, was demolishing Solzhenitsyn in the same season in which Moscow was listing the Fourth International among the world's principal anti-communist centres. Two weeks earlier, in the issue of 12 July 1976, Gerry Foley had reported on the conference of European Communist parties held in East Berlin at the end of June, and recorded the fact that most damages this book's central claim: "The fact that the French CP protested the imprisonment of Leonid Plyushch forced the Kremlin to release a left-wing dissident, dealing a significant defeat to bureaucratic repression and the propaganda designed to justify it." Plyushch was a Marxist, held in a psychiatric hospital, freed in January 1976 because communists in the West made a noise about him. On this book's accounting, that campaign was anti-communism. It was the opposite: it was the only thing that worked.
The device itself is older than any of the authors. Trotsky named it the amalgam in The Stalin School of Falsification, published in English in 1937 — the merging of an opponent with an enemy so that one refutation disposes of both, and so that the opponent's actual argument never has to be met. What is instructive about this volume is that it does not hide the device. It states the criterion, applies it in public, and prints the resulting list. Read as a survey of Western Sovietology it is a serviceable if under-sourced institutional inventory, and Chapter Five on Chile and neocolonialism holds up better than most of what surrounded it. Read as what it is — the fullest statement in English of the doctrine that criticism is measured by whose hands it might fall into — it is a primary document of the mechanism by which a state that claimed the October Revolution made it impossible to defend that revolution from the left. Anti-communism was real. This book is the record of what was done with the word.