This book is about a single word, and what a state did to it. The word is internationalism — the oldest idea in the socialist movement, older than the parties, older than the Russian Revolution, the idea that working people in every country share an interest that cuts across their borders and their flags. The Theory and Practice of Proletarian Internationalism was produced in 1976 by the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences — specifically its "Section of the Philosophical Aspects of Proletarian Internationalism and National Relations," a team of authors rather than a single named scholar — and issued in English by Progress Publishers in Moscow the same year. Its closing line of the Foreword tells you who it was written for: "We trust that this book will be of use to our friends abroad." It is an export text, meant for the shelves of sympathisers and Communist Parties in the West, and it sets out, with the calm authority of the Soviet philosophical establishment, exactly what "internationalism" had come to mean by the middle of the 1970s.
What it had come to mean is the subject of this introduction, because the meaning had been quietly turned inside out. The book itself supplies both halves of the story, the original and the substitute, and the distance between them is the most important thing in it.
Establish the date first. The spine reads 1976 and the internal evidence agrees: the latest events the authors reach for are the 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1971), the international gathering of Communist Parties held in Moscow in 1969, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the USSR (celebrated at the end of 1972), and a run of five-year-plan figures for 1971–75. There is no 25th Congress here — that met in February 1976 — so the text was closed just before it. This is a genuine mid-1970s book, not an older one in a new jacket.
That moment matters. 1976 sits at the high tide of détente — the relaxation of tension between Moscow and Washington that had produced arms-control treaties and, in August 1975, the Helsinki Final Act. It also sits deep inside the Sino-Soviet split, the open and by then militarised quarrel between the Soviet Union and Communist China that had broken the world movement into rival camps. And it comes eight years after Warsaw Pact tanks had crushed the reform-communist government of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. All three pressures shape the book, and the book's job was to hold a line under all three: to explain to "friends abroad" why the leadership of the international movement belonged, by right and by theory, to Moscow — against the Chinese who denied it, against the Czechoslovak reformers who had tested it, and against Western Communists who were beginning to wonder aloud whether they needed Moscow's blessing at all.
The authors are careful and, to their credit, explicit. They distinguish two terms and rank them: proletarian internationalism and socialist internationalism are "of the same type," but "Socialist internationalism is a new, higher stage in the development of proletarian internationalism." The first belonged to the era of the workers' movement under capitalism; the second is what internationalism becomes once there are socialist states — a "world socialist system," a "socialist community" of countries bound together. The book's three parts follow this ascent: general theory, then the experience of the multinational USSR, then the relations between socialist states.
At the level of the states, internationalism is cashed out as three things: the unity and "cohesion" of the socialist countries, their economic integration through the trading bloc known as Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), and — the load-bearing phrase — "fraternal assistance," the mutual help socialist states owe one another. Around this the book builds a concept it calls "internationalist duty," an obligation that it insists is moral first and legal second, binding the parties and peoples of the socialist community to defend "the positions of world socialism."
None of that, stated so far, is a distortion of the socialist tradition. Solidarity between working people across borders is the tradition. The distortion is in a move the book makes so smoothly that a reader can miss it: the substitution, inside the word "internationalism," of one subject for another.
Here is the classical idea, and the book states it beautifully, because it has to — it is quoting Marx. In Part I the authors reproduce the General Rules that Marx wrote for the International Working Men's Association, the First International founded in 1864: the emancipation of labour is "neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists." The subject of that sentence is the working class. Internationalism is something workers do, a form of "solidarity and mutual assistance" that "grows out of the mutual support and assistance afforded by the national detachments of the working class." The book knows this. Its opening chapter is titled, in so many words, the theory and practice of uniting proletarians of all nations and countries. Its own account of the early Comintern — the Communist International of 1919, the "Third International" — is an account of workers acting from below: the "Hands off Soviet Russia" strikes, the German workers who refused to arm the White Poles, the international brigades of 54 nations in Spain.
Then the subject changes. Once socialist states exist, internationalism stops being what the working class owes to itself and becomes what everyone owes to a particular state and a particular party. Watch where the duty points. "Communist construction in the USSR," the authors write, "is not only the national task of the Soviet people; it is also its chief internationalist duty." Read that twice. The one internationalist obligation the book assigns to the Soviet Union is to build up the Soviet Union. For everyone else, internationalism means orientation toward Moscow. The Communist and Workers' Parties are warned against the "cunning tactics" of imperialists who encourage them "to isolate" themselves "from the vanguard of the world communist movement — the CPSU, the Party of Lenin." A party that measures its freedom by its "independence" of the Soviet party is not exercising internationalism; it is "betraying the revolutionary ideals of the working class."
This is the reversal in one line. Workers of all countries, unite — a call the workers address to each other — has become an instruction that the parties of all countries defer to a leading centre. The book does contain a formula of reciprocity: a joint Soviet-Czechoslovak communiqué it quotes says each party "bears an internationalist responsibility to the countries of the socialist community." But notice that even the reciprocal duty runs toward the community, that is, toward the bloc whose acknowledged vanguard is the CPSU. The obligation is horizontal in wording and vertical in fact. Internationalism, as this book defines it, is a duty others owe the Soviet Union, and it is never once a duty the Soviet Union owes anyone that could be enforced against it.
A doctrine of "fraternal assistance" has to be tested against the one case that made the phrase notorious, and the book does not flinch from it — which is itself revealing, since several other volumes in this Progress series pass over 1968 in silence. Here it is named, defended, and made into theory.
The mechanism first, stated in the authors' own voice: "The development of co-operation between the socialist states has also raised the question of the military assistance to be provided by the countries of the socialist community to a state in which, for some reason, the socialist gains are threatened by internal counter-revolution and imperialist reaction. Proceeding from these principles, the socialist states provided such assistance to the Czechoslovak people in 1968." The invasion of a socialist country by five of its allies has become "military assistance" rendered "to the Czechoslovak people" — the people, that is, whose government the tanks removed. This is the doctrine that the West named after the Soviet leader Brezhnev: that the socialist community may override the sovereignty of any of its members when "socialist gains" are judged to be at risk. The book states it as a principle of internationalism.
Then the blessing. The authors quote, approvingly, a verdict on the invasion: the entry of the five armies into Czechoslovakia was "an act of internationalist solidarity," and "This internationalist act saved the lives of thousands of people, ensured internal and external conditions for peaceful labour, consolidated the western borders of the socialist camp and destroyed the hopes of imperialist circles to revise the results of the Second World War." The source given for these words is the document The Lessons of the Crisis — the self-condemnation adopted in 1970 by the "normalised" Czechoslovak leadership installed after the invasion, under Gustáv Husák. So the occupied country's own reinstalled Central Committee is produced as the witness that the occupation was solidarity. That is not an accident of the argument; it is the argument. The reformers of 1968 are recast as "opportunist elements" who "tried to discredit the idea of internationalist duty by appealing to the national feelings of the Czechs and Slovaks." Wanting your country's government to be chosen by your country has become a symptom of "bourgeois nationalism." Husák himself is quoted to seal it: national sovereignty "devoid of class content is a refined and very effective weapon of the Right opportunist, revisionist and anti-socialist forces." Sovereignty, in short, is legitimate only when it points the same way the tanks did.
The word "internationalism" has now done a complete circle. It began as the solidarity workers extend to one another against their rulers. It ends as the name for an army sent by one workers' state to unseat the government of another. The same word covers the German strikers of 1920 who would not arm the Poles, and the five armies of 1968. That is what the CPSU made "internationalism" mean, and this book is the philosophical justification of it, set out for readers abroad in plain expository prose.
The Sino-Soviet split forces the doctrine into its second characteristic move. If loyalty to Moscow is the content of internationalism, then a Communist Party that breaks with Moscow cannot be presented as taking a different internationalist line — it must be recast as having abandoned internationalism altogether, that is, as nationalist. The book does exactly this, methodically, with China.
The Communist Party of China is not treated as a rival interpreter of Marxism but as a case of infection: "as the influence of Chinese internationalist Communists declined, so nationalism became more prevalent in the ideology and policies of the Communist Party of China." The Chinese leaders, the authors say through a Brezhnev quotation, moved "from polemics with the Communist Parties" to "splitting, subversive activity," and their guiding aim is purely destructive — "the objective of doing the greatest possible damage to the USSR … is now the sole criterion determining the Chinese leaders' approach to any major international problem." The verdict is flat: "The Maoists' nationalism is helping imperialism and not the forces that are struggling against it."
Whatever one thinks of Maoism — and there is much to criticise in it — notice the shape of the accusation. Because internationalism has been defined as orientation to a centre, disagreement with the centre can only be described as nationalism, splitting, and objective service to the enemy. The category has been built so that it cannot be turned back on the CPSU. The Soviet party is, by construction, the party that combats nationalism; it can never be the party accused of it. This is worth stating precisely, because it is the deepest problem with the book and not merely a matter of tone: the central term is defined in such a way that only opponents can ever fall under it. A concept that can convict everyone except its author is not an analytical tool. It is a loyalty oath with footnotes.
None of this went unanswered, and the answer had been in print for forty years by the time this book appeared. The anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition — the current associated with Leon Trotsky and, after his murder in 1940, with the Fourth International — had diagnosed precisely this transformation of "internationalism" as it happened.
The root of it, in that analysis, is the doctrine of "socialism in one country," the claim advanced by Stalin from 1924 that a complete socialist society could be built inside the borders of the USSR alone. Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin (1928) called this what it was: a break with the internationalism of Marx and Lenin, dressed as its continuation. "On August 4, 1914," he wrote — the day the German socialists voted war credits and the Second International collapsed into national camps — "the death knell sounded for national programs for all time." A genuinely revolutionary party "can base itself only upon an international program," and "herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism." The point is exactly the one the 1976 book inverts: for Trotsky the national orientation of the workers "must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa." "Socialism in one country" reversed the arrow — it made the world movement's task the defence of one national state — and everything else followed.
What followed, Trotsky argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), was a foreign policy to match. "Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy," he wrote in that book's eighth chapter, and the theory of socialism in one country "already signalized an effort to liberate Soviet foreign policy from the program of international revolution." The Communist International was not dissolved; it was captured. "The less the policy of the Kremlin preserved of its former internationalism, the more firmly the ruling clique clutched in its hands the rudder of the Communist International … At the present time, the Communist International is a completely submissive apparatus in the service of Soviet foreign policy, ready at any time for any zigzag whatever." Written in 1936, that sentence describes the machinery whose mature doctrine the 1976 book states without embarrassment: an "internationalism" whose content is the interest of a single state, and whose test is obedience.
The Revolution Betrayed is the standard against which every volume in this series that speaks for the Soviet state should be read. Its argument is not that the October Revolution failed but that a privileged administrative caste had risen on top of it — a bureaucracy defending its own position — and had refitted the language of the revolution to that end. The redefinition of internationalism traced above is a textbook case: a word that once named the self-emancipation of the working class made over into the name for loyalty to the men who governed in the working class's name. Readers who want the reply at book length have, in this series' companion volumes, the primary texts; readers who want it argued against the same doctrine in its 1970s form will find it in the sibling introductions to Contemporary Trotskyism (Basmanov, 1972), to the Leninist Theory of Socialist Revolution (1975), and to Socialism and Democracy (1974), each of which meets a different face of the same official case.
A reader told that everything here is worthless would learn nothing, and it would not be true. This book is a real transmission-belt for the genuine internationalist heritage, even as it bends the heritage to a new purpose, and the transmission is worth having.
The historical chapters of Part I are the best of it. The account of working-class solidarity with the young Soviet republic — the "Hands off Soviet Russia" movement, Harry Pollitt and the British committee, the German dockers and the White Poles, the international workers' relief organised through Clara Zetkin during the Volga famine of 1921, the arms smuggled to Russian revolutionaries in 1905 — is drawn from real events and real documents, and it recovers a history of voluntary solidarity from below that most Western readers of 1976 would never have encountered. When the book quotes Marx's General Rules, or Lenin on the alliance "coming into being between the revolutionaries of different nations," it is handing the reader the authentic article. The irony is deep and instructive: the same volume that redefines internationalism as obedience preserves, in its opening chapters, the record of an internationalism that was nothing of the kind — the record of workers who acted on their own judgement, across borders, against their own governments. That record is the standing refutation of the doctrine built on top of it, and it is here in the book, undamaged, for anyone who reads Part I against Part III.
Two heritages, then, are transmitted in these pages, and they do not agree. One is Marx's International Working Men's Association and Lenin's stand in 1914 against the "social-chauvinism" that had wrecked the Second International — the insistence that a socialist who backs his own government in its wars against the workers of other countries has ceased to be a socialist. The other is the doctrine of 1968, "internationalist assistance" delivered by tank. The book presents the second as the mature form of the first. It is nearer the truth to say that the second was built out of the wreckage of the first, and that the wreck has a date the book itself supplies — the vote of 4 August 1914, which Trotsky called a death knell and which this book, quoting the early Comintern with one hand while justifying Prague with the other, never quite hears.
Read it, therefore, for what it honestly is: the clearest statement in English of what the largest state descended from October taught the world to call internationalism, at the calm centre of the 1970s, with the Chinese quarrel and the Czechoslovak reckoning both fresh. On the authors' own evidence — their own quotation of Marx, their own record of solidarity from below — the word they are defending and the word they are using are not the same word. The reader who holds the two apart will have understood both the book and the tradition it claims.