This is a university textbook. The authors say so themselves, in the last paragraph of their introduction: "The work is based on a lecture course in the history of the United States given at the history department of Moscow State University for several years." N. V. Sivachyov and E. F. Yazkov were professors there, and the note Progress printed at the back describes them as "two Moscow University professors who on several occasions visited the United States of America to study documentary sources in the US National Archive and in the libraries of the Columbia, Harvard, Wisconsin and other universities." That is not a boast a Progress blurb could have made in 1950, and it is worth pausing on. These men had read in American archives. It shows on almost every page.
Unusually for this series, the date on the spine is close to honest. Most Progress translations lag their Russian originals by years, and several volumes we have republished carry a jacket a decade younger than the text inside. Here the internal evidence points where the imprint does: the narrative runs to Gerald Ford's speech of 18 May 1975 and his "State of the World Address" of 10 April 1975, to the reorganisation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1975, to the "Rally For Jobs Now" of 26 April 1975 and to a Communist Party conference of late February 1975. The Russian imprint codes on the copyright page read 1976. Read this as a book of 1975–76: a détente-era survey, written at Moscow State University for Soviet students, and exported in English to explain the citadel of capitalism to readers in Delhi, Lagos and London.
What it was commissioned to do is stated plainly at the front. The introduction announces that "the socialist system has convincingly demonstrated its superiority over modern state-monopoly capitalism," and that influential parts of the American ruling class are being compelled "to move toward the normalization of Soviet-American relations and to recognize the principles of peaceful coexistence." That is the Brezhnev-era foreign-policy line converted into a periodisation of American history, and it governs the shape of the book: American politics is presented throughout as a contest between reactionary adventurism and a "more realistic approach," with the second gaining ground because the world balance of forces obliges it to. It is a thesis with a diplomatic purpose. It is also, as a way of reading Nixon and Ford, not a stupid one.
The eleventh chapter is called "Soviet Studies of the Recent History of the USA," and it is the most useful thing in the book for anyone who wants to know how Soviet Americanism actually worked. It gives the institutional history: the first monographs in the 1930s by A. V. Yefimov, L. I. Zubok and V. I. Lan; the Sector on US and Canadian History founded in 1953 at the Institute of World History; the Institute of US studies established in Moscow in 1968 and renamed the Institute of US and Canadian Studies in 1974. It credits, by name, dozens of working scholars. It is candid about gaps — it admits that the study of the major parties, of third-party movements and of representative institutions is underdeveloped, and that "the postwar ideological struggle in the USA has yet to be given full coverage by Soviet historians."
It is also, quietly, a chapter in which the authors review themselves. Sivachyov's own work appears three times in the third person: research on the law of labour relations "has been successfully continued by N. V. Sivachyov, with the publication in 1972 of a study of US labor relations from the 1930s to the present time"; monographs on the 1930s "by V. L. Malkov, D. G. Nadzhafov and N. V. Sivachyov" are commended; Sivachyov is listed again among those who have written on postwar ideology. Yazkov appears in the same register — work on the farmers' movement "written by V. P. Zolotukhin and E. F. Yazkov." Nowhere does the chapter say that two of the scholars being praised are holding the pen. The convention is not fraud; it is the etiquette of a collective, in which individual authorship is dissolved into the achievements of the field. But the reader should know that when this book tells you Soviet scholarship has made progress, the scholarship is partly its own.
One entry in that survey will interest readers of this series: "a monograph by V. A. Nikitin on the emergence of the ultra-right in the USA during the postwar period." That is the Russian original of The Ultras in the USA, which Progress issued in English in 1981 and which we have republished with an introduction of its own. Here it is, in 1976, already a standard citation. The two books belong to one workshop, and — as will become clear — they have one hole in common.
Soviet Americanism had a structural advantage over much of the American academy of the same date: it took for granted that class conflict, racism and imperial expansion were the organising facts of American life, and it went looking for them with American sources in hand. Applied mechanically that assumption distorts. Applied to this period it produced a survey that covers, as a matter of course, subjects US textbooks of 1976 covered thinly or not at all.
The account of Black America is the clearest case. The book records that Ku Klux Klan membership "had reached 4.5 million by 1924" and that "In the period 1919–1922 alone 239 Blacks were lynched." It notes that the steel companies broke the 1919 strike partly by importing strikebreakers, "primarily Blacks, who, as a rule, were outside the ranks of the organized labor movement" — a fact about the racial structure of American industrial defeat that a good deal of union-friendly writing has preferred to leave alone. It gives the Communist Party proper credit for Scottsboro: "Of particular significance was the 1931 campaign to save the lives of nine Black youths in Scottsboro, Alabama, falsely accused of the rape of white women." And it notices the anti-lynching bill killed in the Senate in 1938 by Southern Democrats "with the support of reactionary Republicans" — the coalition that shaped American social policy for a generation.
The New Deal chapter is better than its reputation would predict. It is not a Third Period tract; nobody here is called a social fascist. Roosevelt "went down in history as one of the most important, far-seeing and realistic of American political figures," and the reforms are treated as real. What the book denies is the interpretation, not the facts: "In point of fact Roosevelt's New Deal was merely a variety of bourgeois reformism, directed at retaining the influence of bourgeois ideology over the masses of populace, deflecting them from the struggle against capitalism and in this way consolidating the class dominance of the US monopoly bourgeoisie." The political mission of the New Deal, it says, "consisted in using the methods of social maneuver to blunt the mass workers' and farmers' movement that rolled over the country during the crisis period of 1929–1933."
A reader from this tradition should be honest about how familiar that sounds. George Novack, writing as William F. Warde in Fourth International in March 1943 — "Ten Years of the New Deal" — reached the same conclusion from the other side of the split, and put it better. Roosevelt, he wrote, "took the road of reform rather than the road of fascist reaction," and the reason "lies, not in the greater kindliness and devotion to democracy of the American plutocracy, but in their favored material circumstances": being the richest bourgeoisie on earth, "the rulers of America could still afford to buy their way out of the crisis by throwing certain sops to the labor and farmer aristocracy." Novack also noted what Sivachyov and Yazkov do not — that "Hitler came to power in Germany at the same time as Roosevelt in the United States, and as a result of the same world crisis of capitalism." On the class content of the New Deal the anti-Stalinist and the Soviet accounts converge almost completely. That convergence is a fair measure of how much of this book is simply Marxist history done competently, and it should make the reader more attentive, not less, to the places where the two accounts part.
The book is also good on the wartime no-strike pledge, and refreshingly unsentimental. It calls the December 1941 agreement "a complex matter which had ambiguous consequences," and then makes the argument: "the agreement was clearly unbalanced in the benefits it yielded," since a promise not to lock out, "in a period of radical expansion in industry and of acute manpower shortages," cost employers nothing while a promise not to strike cost workers everything. It records the revolt — the Michigan CIO council declaring itself unbound in June 1943, the referendums, Emil Rieve resigning from the War Labor Board in February 1945 calling it "little more than a rubber stamp" — and it concedes, in one sentence more candid than the Party's own histories, that "The leadership of the CIO and AFL and of the Communist Party observed it to the end of the war, but among the locals it was unwelcome on more than one occasion."
And the chapter on McCarthyism is genuinely strong. Its opening move is to refuse the personalisation: "to reduce McCarthyism to the activity of one errant senator, as is the habit of bourgeois historians, is to understate the depth of the socio-political crisis giving fuel to this movement." It traces the Taft following into the McCarthy base, notes that Joseph Kennedy was McCarthy's friend, that John F. Kennedy "far from opposing the demagogue, actually lent his support to the reactionary crusaders in his public speeches," and that Robert Kennedy served as counsel on McCarthy's committee — details American liberal historiography of the period was inclined to hurry past. It records Eisenhower cutting the paragraph defending George Marshall from his Wisconsin speech. Its verdict, that "the collusion between conservative Republicans and McCarthyites, who were urging the country in a fascist direction, was a manifestation of a crisis in the entire political and constitutional structure of the US government," is arguable but seriously argued.
That is the case for the book. Everything that follows depends on the reader accepting it.
Now the failures, and the first is specific enough to be checked in an afternoon.
The book knows that 1934 was the hinge year. It gives the figures — 1,467,000 strikers in 1934, 4.5 million across 1933–36 — and it names a decisive event: "The San Francisco general strike of July 1934 represented a high point in and served as a spur to the labor movement in the United States." It credits Harry Bridges by name. It then goes on to the textile general strike of September 1934 and the miners in 1935.
There were three great strikes in 1934, not one. The Auto-Lite strike in Toledo in the spring was led by the Musteites of the American Workers Party through their Unemployed League. The Minneapolis truckers' strikes — three of them, through the summer — were led by Trotskyists: Vincent, Miles and Grant Dunne, Carl Skoglund, Farrell Dobbs, working through Teamsters Local 574. Together with San Francisco these three broke the deadlock of the early Depression and made the industrial union upsurge, and the CIO, possible.
Search this volume for the other two and you find nothing. "Toledo" does not appear. "Auto-Lite" does not appear. The American Workers Party does not appear; neither does the word "Musteite." "Minneapolis" occurs twice — once as the city of which Hubert Humphrey was mayor, once as a place of publication in the bibliography. Local 574 is absent, and so is Local 544, which it became. The Dunne brothers, Skoglund, Dobbs and James P. Cannon are not in the book. The chronological appendix at the back lists, for the whole of 1934, one labour event: "1934 General strike begins in San Francisco."
Of the three strikes of 1934, the book has kept exactly the one whose best-known leader was aligned with the Communist Party, and dropped the two led by the Communist Party's rivals on the left. That is not a gap in the sources. Cannon's own narrative, "The Great Minneapolis Strikes," was published in Fourth International in May 1944, and it is not a coy document. He explains that the Trotskyists were too new in the union to hold office — "not a single one of our people ... was an official of the union during the three strikes. But they organized and led the strikes just the same," through an "Organizing Committee," a body he calls "a sort of extra-legal body." He recounts the extraordinary spectacle of a Farmer-Labor governor, Floyd Olson, declaring martial law against the strike and then raiding its headquarters: "A Farmer-Labor governor proclaimed martial law and stopped the trucks from running." And he sets out precisely the fact the Soviet chronology suppresses: "Toledo and Minneapolis had become linked as twin symbols of the two highest points of proletarian militancy and conscious leadership."
A textbook may abbreviate. But a textbook that returns to the Farmer-Labor tradition on page after page, that discusses Minnesota's Congressman Lundeen and the Workers' Bill, and that reaches for the 1934 strike wave as evidence that the New Deal failed to buy class peace, and still contrives not to mention the strikes that made Minneapolis a byword, is not abbreviating. It is selecting.
The second failure is the same erasure performed by a different technique, and this series has now watched three books do it three different ways.
Sivachyov and Yazkov introduce the Act in their chapter on the war, in a passage dealing with 1941. They give it accurately and even quote the statute: the second and third articles punish anyone who "knowingly or willfully advocate(s), abet(s), advise(s), or teach(es) the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government." And then comes the sentence that does the work: "Yet another piece of legislation initiated by Smith was already adopted back in 1940. The Smith Act, an amendment to the Alien Registration Act, was destined to acquire considerable importance in postwar America."
Postwar. The Act's importance is dispatched into the future in the middle of a chapter about 1941 — the year the Act was first used. A grand jury empanelled at St Paul, Minnesota, returned an indictment dated 15 July 1941 against twenty-nine leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and of Teamsters Local 544 — the first name on it Vincent Ray Dunne, the third James P. Cannon — charging them with conspiring "to overthrow, put down, and to destroy by force the Government of the United States of America." Eighteen were convicted and imprisoned. The full text was printed in Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 7, August 1941. They were the first Smith Act defendants in American history, and the precedent their conviction established was the one used against the Communist Party's own leaders in 1949 — a prosecution this book does narrate, at line after line, with entire justice, and with the observation that Truman "brought 12 leaders of the CPUS A before the courts under the Smith Act" to remove an election-year weapon from his opponents' hand.
Set the three volumes side by side. The Ultras in the USA (1981) names the Act in 1940 and then jumps to the Foley Square trial of 1949, leaving the intervening years blank. Recent History of the Labor Movement in the USA (1979) fills the blank with a falsehood, stating that during the war the Act "was directed against espionage and subversive organizations of the fascist countries." This book, the earliest of the three and the most scholarly, does something subtler and in some ways more revealing: it tells the truth about the statute, in the correct chapter, and then relocates its significance to a decade in which the defendants were Communists. Three books, three methods, one hole — which suggests the hole was in the field rather than in any one author.
The contemporaneous reply is available and was written by a serious historian. Novack, again as William F. Warde, covered the trial for Fourth International in December 1941. He noted that the prosecution's evidence consisted largely of the Marxist classics: "Suddenly, in 1941 these writings become converted into flaming bombs for blowing up the Capitol at Washington." He observed that "The Smith Act is the American equivalent of the Japanese law forbidding 'dangerous thoughts.'" And he recorded, with a precision that has not dated, the judge's chosen analogy: "in language more familiar to Moscow than Minneapolis, Judge Joyce compared the Socialist Workers Party to Hitler's followers."
The Communist Party of the United States welcomed that prosecution. Sivachyov and Yazkov do not mention the prosecution, and so are not obliged to mention the welcome.
They do mention the Socialist Workers Party — once, thirty years out of position. It appears in the chapter on the 1960s, among the "petty-bourgeois ideologists" who exploited the theoretical weakness of the New Left: "The Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite organization, expanded its activities and the Progressive Labor Party (Maoist) appeared. Their chief weapon was slandering the socialist countries and communist parties as well as the advocation of petty-bourgeois fractiousness." The party can be named when it can be dismissed. It cannot be named in 1934, when it led a strike, or in 1941, when its leaders went to prison.
The fifth chapter opens: "World War II like World War I began far from the United States." It sets its own frame explicitly — "from September 1, 1939, until Japan's raid on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941" — and then gives twenty pages of genuinely good diplomatic history: the Neutrality Act fight, cash-and-carry, the Welles mission, the destroyers-for-bases deal of 2 September 1940, Lend-Lease, the America First Committee and Robert E. Wood, the collapse of the isolationists at the 1940 Republican convention. It is candid about awkward things. It says outright that during the phoney war "many internationalists and isolationists were united in their condemnation of the Soviet Union which until March 1940 was engaged in a war with Finland," and that Roosevelt kept Moscow off Welles's itinerary "to placate the anti-Soviet circles."
What it never says is why the war began on 1 September 1939. The German–Soviet non-aggression treaty of 23 August 1939 does not appear in this chapter, or in the chapter on the 1930s, or anywhere in the book. The word "pact" is used of Munich, and of George Meany's proposed "non-aggression pact" between labour and management in the 1950s. A book that will discuss the Winter War in a paragraph about American public opinion will not discuss the agreement that preceded it.
The consequence for the American story is exact. Between September 1939 and June 1941 the Communist Party of the United States opposed American involvement in what it called the second imperialist war, and campaigned against Roosevelt's foreign policy; after 22 June 1941 it became the most militant advocate of intervention in American public life. That reversal is the central political fact about the American left in those twenty-two months. This book's account of those twenty-two months does not contain the Communist Party at all. It sorts American opinion into internationalists and isolationists, places anti-fascist workers among the former, and moves on. Where the sibling volume of 1979 falsified the date of the turn — backdating it to "the second half of 1940" so that it could be presented as ripening rather than instruction — this volume simply declines to record that there was a party with a line.
The same reticence governs Browder. The whole of the CPUSA's greatest internal crisis is given five sentences: "At the initiative of Earl Browder the party was transformed in 1944 into the American Communist Political Association with a program calling for purely educational measures. Far from a mere reorganization, this amounted to the liquidation of the party. In the summer of 1944, the steadfast elements of the party led by William Foster restored the Communist Party of the USA but the damage inflicted in 1944–1945 had far-reaching consequences." That is the whole of it, and the chronology is wrong. The party was dissolved into the Communist Political Association in May 1944; Jacques Duclos's article criticising Browder appeared in April 1945; the Communist Party was reconstituted in July 1945, not in the summer of 1944; Browder was expelled in February 1946. The book's dating collapses fourteen months and makes the correction look spontaneous. Duclos is not named — which is the point, since naming him would locate the initiative in Paris and, behind Paris, in Moscow. Browder's expulsion is not mentioned. His name appears exactly once in the index. The man who led the American party for fifteen years is a single subordinate clause about a reorganisation.
Chapter VII is a sustained indictment of a state that punished opinion. It is correct in that indictment, and the material is well chosen. It quotes the Communist Party's 1954 programme with evident approval — "McCarthyism aims to impose fascism on the country ... It burns books and destroys art and culture ... McCarthyism seeks to turn America into a land of yes-men and informers, a land where patriotism is replaced with jingoism, independent thought with conformity, courage with servility." It records Bob Thompson, a Lincoln Brigade veteran, telling the judge who had just given him seven years that the campaign to outlaw the Communist Party and "the current bold bid for national power by the McCarthy mob are two sides of the same coin." It notes that after 1949 "the courts and the prisons were virtually the only institutions with their doors remaining open for Communists."
Every one of those sentences describes something that happened. Every one of them also describes, more exactly, the state that commissioned the book. There is no acknowledgement of this anywhere. Stalin appears six times, always as a wartime diplomatic counterpart receiving messages from Roosevelt. The phrase "cult of personality" does not occur. The Twentieth Congress does not occur. The Moscow Trials do not occur. Hungary does not occur. Czechoslovakia is mentioned once. The year 1937 recurs throughout, always in connection with American events. Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code — circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system, added in 1966 and used against writers throughout the years these lectures were being delivered — could not appear and does not.
The asymmetry is worth stating without relish, because the book itself supplies the evidence for it. Sivachyov and Yazkov's account of the American witch-hunt has an ending, and the ending is that the witch-hunters lost — beaten in the courts, in the press and at the ballot box by American citizens using American institutions. They report the strike statistics that prove the labour movement was never subdued: 26,862 strikes between 1949 and 1954, with 15,130,000 participants. A system whose repression can be defeated by its own citizens is not the same kind of system as one whose citizens have no such recourse. The authors have every fact needed for that conclusion and are professionally unable to write it down.
Read the research. On the economics of state-monopoly capitalism, on the structure of American industrial concentration, on strike statistics and union membership, on the Black movement, on the mechanics of the two-party system and the third-party attempts that failed against it, on McCarthyism as a social phenomenon rather than a biography, and on the diplomacy of 1939–41, this is a competent survey built out of American sources by scholars who had used American archives. There were American textbooks in 1976 that told a reader less about the class structure of their own country.
Read the silences as evidence of a different kind. They are not random. They cluster on exactly two subjects: the rivals of the Communist Party on the American left, and the conduct of the Soviet state. Minneapolis in 1934, Toledo in 1934, the Smith Act in 1941, the party line between September 1939 and June 1941, Duclos in 1945, Browder's expulsion in 1946 — each removal protects the same proposition, that the Communist Party was the continuous revolutionary thread in American life and that its record requires no explanation.
The record is available and was written down as it happened. James P. Cannon's "The Great Minneapolis Strikes," Fourth International, May 1944, is the account of 1934 by one of the people who directed it. The indictment of the eighteen is printed in full in Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 7, August 1941, and George Novack's report on the trial is in the issue for December 1941; Fourth International returned to the case in February 1945. Novack's "Ten Years of the New Deal," in the issue for March 1943, is the analysis this book's fourth chapter shadows without knowing it, and is the fairer test of whether Marxist history of the United States required the omissions this volume made. Art Preis's Labor's Giant Step (1964) carries the industrial history at length from the same side. For the war itself, Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (1986) is the Fourth International's full-length reply to the Soviet account — and, since this series holds its own tradition to the standard it applies to Progress, it should be said that Mandel's text misdates the Secret Additional Protocol by four days; it was signed on the night of 23 August 1939, the date this book does not print at all.