This is the best book in the series, and the reason is that its editors mostly got out of the way. Seven hundred pages of minutes, mandates, financial accounts, greetings telegrams and commission papers from the six days in September 1872 when the International Working Men's Association held its last congress, transcribed from the manuscripts in the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow — the Marx-Engels papers, which the Soviet state had bought, gathered and, whatever else it did, kept. Its full title is The Hague Congress of the International Working Men's Association, September 2–7, 1872 (Minutes and Documents), and it appeared in a Progress series called Documents of the First International. The Russian edition was prepared by Irene Bach, Antonina Koroteyeva and Tatyana Vasilyeva under Bach's general editorship and published in 1970; the English translation is by Richard Dixon and Alex Miller, the same hands responsible for much of the Collected Works, with Natalia Karmanova, Margarita Lopukhina, Maria Shcheglova and Ludgarda Zubrilova editing for Progress. The copyright page carries no printing history — only "© Translation into English, Progress Publishers 1976" — so the English text is a first printing of a six-year-old Russian book, and 1970 is the date to argue from. Nor is this the whole of the project, though the preface does not say so: a companion volume, The Hague Congress of the First International … Reports and Letters, followed from Progress in 1978, and we know of it because the Institute's own International Working-Class Movement cites both side by side. The 1976 volume's claim to contain "all the extant official documents directly reflecting the work of the Congress and its commissions" is therefore narrower than it sounds. Within that scope it is a serious scholarly edition, and a reader who wants to know what actually happened at The Hague has to come here.
Start with the apparatus, because that is where an edition either earns trust or loses it. The preface tells you exactly which manuscripts survive and in what state: Benjamin Le Moussu's official French minutes, which begin only at the third sitting; Friedrich Sorge's fuller notes, extant in two slightly differing copies, one of them the Wisconsin manuscript published in facsimile by Hans Gerth in 1958, whose variant readings this edition gives in footnotes; and the fragmentary notes of Nikolai Zhukovsky, whose mandate the congress refused. The notes describe the physical documents — pencil on thirty-six sheets of a ledger-book, sheets 15.6 by 10.3 centimetres, Engels writing on the inner envelope of a letter — with the fussiness of people who have handled the paper. Crossings-out in the manuscripts are restored in footnotes, including ones that are not flattering: where Engels deleted a passage conceding that the General Council recognised the New Madrid Federation "in despite of the Regulations," the deleted words are printed.
More tellingly, the edition publishes its opponents. Zhukovsky was an anarchist and his minutes are given anyway, with the note observing only that his record "is not free from prejudice, but serves as a supplement to Sorge's report." Note 37 reproduces, from the anarchist historian Max Nettlau's biography of Bakunin, Zhukovsky's pencil record of the expulsion debate — which means that a Moscow institute printed James Guillaume saying "This has been a tendentious trial" and Adhémar Schwitzguébel saying "The workers will condemn the decision of the majority." The main body of the minutes carries Guillaume's charge in full, including his comparison of the commission's verdict to the Commune's leaders being "led to the scaffold side by side with thieves." On the disputed authorship of the Catechism of the Revolutionary, the note is exemplary: "Some researchers attribute it to Bakunin, others to Nechayev. Utin has no doubts of its having been written by Bakunin." And note 141 records, without comment or resistance, Guillaume's observation that the General Council's powers had been enlarged at Basle "partly through the efforts of Bakunin," who then thought the Council more revolutionary than the sections. None of that had to be there.
The hardest test of an edition, though, is what it does when its sources disagree about a fact its publisher has an interest in, and here the volume passes it twice over. Two records of the expulsion votes are printed, and they do not match. Sorge's minutes report "Expulsion of Bakunin from the International Working Men's Association: carried by 29 votes to 7 with 8 abstentions." The congress resolutions — drawn up by Marx and Engels and published in London in October 1872, printed here as well — resolve "To exclude Michael Bakounine. Voted for, 27; against, 6; abstentions, 7." Two votes and one abstention apart, on the most consequential decision the International ever took, and the edition reconciles them nowhere. It goes further. Beneath the resolutions it sets out, from the French text, the roll-call by name: the twenty-seven who voted to expel Bakunin, Marx and Engels among them; the six who voted against, Désiré Brismée and Victor Dave and the Belgians; and the seven who abstained, a list that includes Guillaume, who was expelled on the next vote. Alongside the resolutions' own admission that "these votes upon the Alliance were taken after a great number of ... delegates had been obliged to leave," the editors add a footnote recording that Engels's manuscript at that point read "French, English" where the printed text says French and German. A publisher inventing a clean story does not print the roll, the discrepancy and Engels's second thoughts about who had gone home.
So the documents are the documents, and the notes are largely a working scholar's notes. What remains is the preface — nine pages, roughly 3,200 words, unsigned, issued in the name of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism — and the preface is a different kind of writing.
Its argument is announced in the first paragraph: the congress "marked the victory of scientific communism over anarchism and other anti-Marxist trends in the International." The task of the congress, we are told, included "to put an end to the disorganising and splitting activity of the Bakuninists." Note the tense. The outcome is folded back into the agenda, so that what the delegates decided becomes what they had been convened to decide. The climax of the preface is the adoption of Clause 7a on the political party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which "signified the victory of the principles of Marxism in the programme of the International."
Against that, consider what the preface does not say, and consider it by counting. In its 3,200 words the string Bakunin occurs eight times, and on every one of those eight occasions it is inside the word Bakuninist. The man is never named in his own right in the preface to the congress that expelled him. Guillaume does not occur at all. The word expulsion appears once, and it is the Spanish federation demanding, before the congress opened, "the expulsion of sectarians from the International" — not the congress's own act. New York appears once, and it is New York Section No. 1 issuing a mandate to its delegate Karl Marx. Nothing tells the reader that Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled; nothing tells the reader that the General Council was moved to New York. Those were the two decisive acts of the congress. In the body of the book, freed from the preface, Bakunin occurs 694 times, Guillaume 219, New York 141. A congress of sixty-five expelled the most famous revolutionary in Europe on some forty votes cast in a thinning hall, and said so, twice, in two counts that disagree. The preface, summarising, records neither the act nor the arithmetic.
That is the whole of the criticism, and it is worth stating just as plainly what the criticism is not. This apparatus does not read 1872 through 1972. In roughly 240,000 words Lenin is never once cited, quoted or invoked — the word Leninism occurs four times and every one of them is the publishing institute's own name. Stalin does not appear at all, nor Mao, nor any analogy to the Sino-Soviet split or to Paris in May 1968. The phrase "petty-bourgeois" occurs five times in the whole volume, twice in speeches made by delegates in 1872 and twice in the annotation, in contexts a nineteenth-century historian would use it. The contrast with the sibling volume in this series, Boris Leibson's Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism — published in Russian in 1970, the same year as the Russian text of this book — is total. Leibson runs a single line from Bakunin's secret Alliance through the Barcelona anarchists to Trotsky to the Red Guards to the rue Gay-Lussac, all one disease. Nothing of that kind appears here. Whoever wrote the preface, and whoever wrote the notes, were not doing the same job, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
There is a further comparison worth making carefully, because a companion introduction in this series has made it loosely. The same Institute's The International Working-Class Movement — volume two, covering 1871 to 1904, Progress 1981 — narrates The Hague in a few pages, and it does say what this preface will not: the commission of inquiry "confined itself to recommending the expulsion of Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International for their divisive activities. This the congress proceeded to do." It reports the transfer of the General Council to New York, with Engels's explanation, and footnotes that the Blanquists walked out when it passed. On the two bare facts, the general history of 1981 is franker than the documentary edition's own preface of 1976. That much holds.
What does not hold is the inference that volume two is therefore the more honest book. Read the passage to the end and the direction of its criticism reverses. Volume two does say that the Alliance resolution was "the only resolution of The Hague congress not entirely in keeping with the line mapped out by Marx and Engels" — but the complaint is that the congress was too lenient, not that it was unjust. Marx and Engels had wanted the Alliance dissolved as a body; the commission, volume two writes, "was misled by the testimony of the Bakuninists," reached no finding on whether the secret Alliance existed, and expelled two men instead, so that "the question of an organisational separation from the anarchists was not resolved." Nothing is conceded to the anti-authoritarian side; the anarchists are conceded only a tactical escape. Guillaume appears in volume two four times, once as the object of a Sorge jibe about wanting the International "without a head", once as the man expelled, twice in apparatus. He is never allowed to speak. In the 1976 volume he speaks for pages, calls the proceedings a tendentious trial, and leaves the hall declaring that though expelled he remains loyal to the International — and the edition prints that too.
So the finding needs restating in its true form. It is not that the general history is more honest than the documentary edition; on any measure of what a reader can check, the documentary edition is incomparably more honest, because it prints the record and the general history only characterises it. The gap is between the two pieces of Institute prose — the 1981 narrative and the 1976 preface — on two specific facts, and it runs the unexpected way. And there is a plain reason for it: volume two's Hague section is footnoted to this book, cited by title, publisher, year and page, and one of those pages is 282 — the first page of the Congress resolutions, the page that carries the vote counts. The general history of 1981 could afford to say that Bakunin was expelled because the documentary edition of 1976 had put the roll-call in print; it read the numbers and reported the act without them. The candour is downstream of the edition, not independent of it.
What the preface does instead is quieter and, for that reason, worth naming. It treats the split as settled rather than as a controversy, and it treats expulsion as housekeeping — something you do to put an end to disorganising activity, like clearing a drain. Apply to it the test this series applies elsewhere: is the accusation cashed out into acts that could be shown not to have happened? In the body of the book, emphatically yes. The charge against Bakunin is made of dated documents — the Alliance's own statutes, Utin's enormous report on its Swiss activity and its connection with the Nechayev case, Mesa's statement on Spain, the letters of French correspondents — every one of them printed here and every one of them arguable with. The preface's own register is the other kind: "disorganising and splitting activity", a property of persons rather than a description of anything done. The book convicts Bakunin on evidence; the preface convicts him on essence, and does not name him while doing it.
It is difficult to read that from an institution whose own founder had been expelled and shot. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism was the successor of the Marx-Engels Institute directed by David Ryazanov, the scholar who did more than anyone to assemble these archives, and who was expelled from the Party in 1931, exiled, and shot in 1938. The people preparing this volume knew that. It does not follow that they falsified anything; the evidence of this book is that they did not. It does follow that the one register in which the editorial voice speaks — expulsion as necessary sanitation, dissent as splitting — is the register that had cost their own institution its founder. The silence about Bakunin's expulsion in a preface to a volume about Bakunin's expulsion is not a lie. It reads like a subject nobody wanted to describe in their own words.
The documents themselves are a good deal less settled than the preface. Engels argues for New York partly on the ground that the London council had been in place eight years and "there must be a change at last to avoid a feared ossification," and partly because he and Marx were tired and would not serve again. Édouard Vaillant, a Communard, objects that "he does not understand why the Council is being transferred so far away from the main body of the army, which is in Europe," and predicts that Europe "will be obliged to find another head for itself." The congress divided on it twice, and the first division was close: "Voted for the change, 26; against, 23; abstentions, 9," before the seat "has been transferred to New York, by 30 votes against 14, for London, and 12 abstentions." Vaillant was right; the International in Europe did not survive, and the New York council wound the Association up at Philadelphia in 1876. Whether the transfer was a strategic retreat, a defence against Bakuninist capture, or a decent burial is still argued over, and the reader of this volume has everything needed to argue about it — including the names of the twenty-six and the twenty-three. That is the mark of a good edition of primary sources: it arms the people who disagree with its preface.
For the tradition from which this introduction is written, the Hague documents have never been comfortable reading, and should not be. They have also never been ignored. The Fourth International marked the International's hundredth anniversary with a declaration of its United Secretariat, "Celebration of the Centenary of the First International," published in World Outlook, vol. 2, no. 32, 25 September 1964, which conceded at the outset that the First International worked "despite political limitations, organizational weakness and consuming internal disputes," and that it "did not prove able to carry on its work to a final successful conclusion." That is a franker sentence than anything in this preface. Twenty-two years earlier, in Fourth International for December 1942, Walter Held had used The Hague as a standard against which to judge the Left Opposition itself: he quotes Engels writing to Bebel that "if we had come out in a conciliatory way at the Hague, if we had hushed up the breaking out of the split — what would have been the result?", and then turns the question on Trotsky, who in 1923 had waited rather than forced the issue against Stalin. "The one opportunity to 'make the bubble burst' was missed by Trotsky in the spring of 1923," Held writes. That is the reflexive use of the argument — 1872 held up not against the Bakuninists but against one's own leadership — and it is the thing that no Institute preface in this catalogue ever does.
On the edition's own merits our tradition also spoke, though from the far side of a split. Reviewing Hans Gerth's Wisconsin volume of 1958 — the only English Hague minutes available before this one, and the edition whose variants Moscow collates here — a reviewer signing only "A.L." in The New International for Spring–Summer 1958 (Shachtman's magazine by then, no longer the Fourth International's) allowed that "students and specialists now have access to invaluable source material" but judged the debates "too fragmentary and skimpy to get a feeling for the issues in dispute and the arguments advanced on each side." That complaint is exactly what the 1976 volume answers, and it should be said plainly: on this subject Moscow produced the better edition, and did so eighteen years later with material no Western editor could reach. The centenary of The Hague itself, in 1972, appears to have passed without comment in the movement's press — nothing in Intercontinental Press across 1971 to 1973, weekly and searched. The reason is not hard to guess. An anti-Stalinist Marxism whose own founders were expelled from an International has to think carefully before celebrating an expulsion, even a justified one, and 1872 is where the argument about what a revolutionary organisation may do to its minorities begins.
Read the preface first, then set it aside, and read the minutes. Sorge's record of the tenth sitting, Guillaume's defence, Utin's enormous and vengeful report on Nechayev, the Portuguese federation's address, the mandate instructing Harriet Law to press for equal pay — this is one of the great documentary collections of the nineteenth-century workers' movement, and it was made available in English by people working for a state that had a great deal to hide. They hid very little of it here.