Most of the Progress volumes in this series apply a theory. This one states it. Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa is the work of Rostislav Ulyanovsky, the Soviet Union's foremost theorist of what Moscow called the "non-capitalist path of development" or "socialist orientation" — the doctrine that a backward, pre-industrial nation, with barely a working class to its name, could cross over to socialism without passing through capitalism, guided by "revolutionary democrats" and underwritten by the USSR. That doctrine is the organising idea of the drafted Indochina and African volumes of this collection: Kaysone Phomvihane's Revolution in Laos, Divilkovsky and Ognetov's The Road to Victory on Vietnam, the anniversary showcase Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution, the Academy of Sciences survey USSR and Countries of Africa, and the treatment of "revolutionary democracy" that runs through the History of India. Those books show the theory at work in one country or region. Here is the theory whole, argued in the open by the man who did most to build it. It is therefore the keystone of this part of the series — the place to read the doctrine before reading its applications, and to judge it against what became of its model cases.
Ulyanovsky (1904–1995) was an orientalist and economist by training, a Doctor of Economics, and by general account a senior figure in the apparatus that made Soviet policy toward the decolonising world — he is usually identified as a deputy head of the CPSU Central Committee's International Department. The book's front matter does not carry that post, and this introduction does not rest anything on it; what matters is not verifiable from a title but from the text, which speaks with the confidence of a man setting out an official line rather than probing an open question. He is, in the phrase the series keeps needing, an apparatus intellectual — but an unusually able one, and, as will emerge, a man with a personal reason to know what the guiding state he trusted was capable of.
The catalogue records 1978, and the Russian original — Издательство «Наука» — is indeed 1978. But the English is described on its own imprint page as a "translation of the revised Russian text," and it carries a second imprint line, "Progress Publishers 1980." The revision is real and datable. In the chapter on the Iranian upheaval the book discusses the overthrow of the Shah, the general strike of the oil workers, the "Islamic Republic" the Iranian people now expect to complete their revolution, and the fact that "Iran has left CENTO" — events of the winter and spring of 1979, the Republic itself proclaimed in April 1979. A book cannot report the fall of the Pahlavi monarchy in a text closed in 1978. The English Present-Day Problems is a 1979–80 revision of a 1978 Russian book, and where its argument turns on the latest events — Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran — it is the later date that governs.
This matters for one sentence above all. Among the states Ulyanovsky counts as newly won for the cause, he writes that "recently they were joined by Afghanistan," whose April 1978 coup had installed a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist party. He lists Afghanistan beside Ethiopia as a country that has "chosen socialist orientation." The text carrying that judgement was being finished in the very months before December 1979, when the Soviet army crossed the Amu Darya to shoot one faction of those revolutionary democrats and install another. The doctrine's leading theorist was celebrating Afghanistan's passage to socialism on the eve of the intervention that would become the doctrine's reductio ad absurdum. He could not have known. The reader of 1980, holding the freshly printed English edition, was in a position to.
Ulyanovsky states the theory with a clarity the series rarely encounters, and the fairest thing is to quote it. Non-capitalist development, he writes, "or what amounts to the same thing, socialist orientation, must be sharply distinguished from the building of socialism, insofar as the former is only a transitional stage on the road to the latter." It is a stage available to nations that have no proletarian revolution behind them, on one condition — the character of the ruling force: "If, on the other hand, the country is ruled by revolutionary-democratic anti-capitalist forces, then there arises the political possibility for the country to take the non-capitalist path of development." Even "economically backward states, in which capitalism has already become the most influential mode of production, also can enter the path of socialist orientation."
The decisive feature — the one on which everything turns — is who does the steering. Not a working class, which in these countries scarcely exists. In the socialist-oriented states, Ulyanovsky is candid, "it is not Marxist-Leninist, but left-democratic and nationalist forces that are in power and implement non-capitalist development and that there is no socialist dictatorship of the working class there." The orientation "in the nearly 15 countries of Asia and Africa is carried out under the guidance of revolutionary national-democratic parties," and he adds, of the states that have lately proclaimed themselves Marxist-Leninist — Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan — that "there is as yet no fully formed working class in these countries." The revolutionary democrat is, in the plainest terms, a stand-in: a substitute for the proletariat, exercising on its behalf a power the proletariat is too small or too unformed to hold itself.
Nor is Ulyanovsky squeamish about where these substitutes come from. "The national-democratic rulers," he observes, "have usually come to power as the result of military and political coups." He gives the phenomenon a name and a pedigree, invoking a curious figure he calls "anti-imperialist bonapartism, with the military intelligentsia and the democratic petty bourgeoisie at the head" — a regime in which, "as a result of the absence of a clearly defined class structure and of political parties in civil society, the army — the anti-imperialist progressive officer corps supported by the rank-and-file soldiers — assumes political leadership in the formation of the nation and the state." A colonel who overthrows a monarchy is thus enrolled, with Soviet aid, as an agent of the transition to socialism. The task, Ulyanovsky says, is to "turn the military-political dictatorship of the army which brought about the coup into a national-democratic dictatorship of the people." The authority behind all this is Leonid Brezhnev, whom Ulyanovsky paraphrases approvingly: there is "a large group of Arab, African and Asian countries today that are following the path of socialist orientation — countries which, though not yet socialist, have rejected capitalism as a system."
To his credit, the doctrine is not naïve about failure. Ulyanovsky writes it in a clause that will matter greatly below: "a turn to capitalism is always possible as shown by the example of a number of states which initially entered the path of non-capitalist development." Egypt is his standing example of a state that "turned away." He even has a category for backsliding — national democracy that abandons the anti-imperialist course "gradually becomes what Lenin called 'reactionary democracy,'" and a state that makes its peace with the West commits an act "which is tantamount to national betrayal." Hold on to that word. It is the hinge on which the whole theory is protected from its own evidence.
The proposition Ulyanovsky defends is not new, and neither is the objection to it. His "national democracy" — an intermediate stage between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions, governed by a bloc that is neither bourgeois nor proletarian, steering a peasant nation toward socialism by stages fixed in advance — is the lineal descendant of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" that the Communist International prescribed for the East in the 1920s. And it is precisely the theory that Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution was written to refute. The refutation was in print in 1930, and it reads as though addressed to this book.
Its second thesis states the colonial case directly: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The quarrel is not over whether the peasant nations of Asia and Africa can be liberated — Trotsky, no less than Ulyanovsky, held that they must be, and that the peasantry is decisive to it. The quarrel is over the substitute. Can a vanguard that is not the working class, standing in for a working class that barely exists, administer socialism into being from above? Trotsky's sixth thesis denies exactly the intermediate formation that Ulyanovsky's "national democracy" claims to be: "Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage, that is, no democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants." The petty-bourgeois masses on whom Ulyanovsky rests his regimes — the officers, the "military intelligentsia," the peasantry itself — cannot, on this view, play an independent leading role; "the peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois," and a state that suspends this choice in a permanent "national-democratic" middle is a fiction that will resolve, under pressure, toward one pole or the other.
Trotsky's thirteenth thesis names the mechanism of the error and could serve as an epigraph to Ulyanovsky's whole enterprise. The theory of socialism in one country, he wrote, "imposes upon revolutions in backward countries the task of establishing an unrealizable regime of democratic dictatorship, which it counterposes to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thereby this theory introduces illusions and fictions into politics." The "illusions and fictions" here have proper names: fifteen of them, a population of over 150 million, a twenty-year "history" that Ulyanovsky insists has "unquestionably ceased to be merely a theoretical hypothesis."
The point is not that Ulyanovsky failed to answer this objection. It is that he does not engage it at all. In ninety thousand words the words "permanent revolution" do not appear, and neither does the name of Trotsky. This is not an oversight; it is the method. The book attacks "populism," "subjective socialism," "petty-bourgeois radicalism," "national reformism," Fanon's cult of violence, Nkrumah's pan-African utopia — a whole gallery of adversaries characterised and dismissed. The one systematic theory of the colonial revolution produced by the Marxist left that contradicts his own is the one he does not name, quote, or refute. An opponent who is quoted can be checked; an opponent who is not mentioned cannot even be found. The doctrine is stated as if its antithesis had never been formulated.
Here is the deeper failing, and it is a failing of intellectual form rather than of sympathy. Ulyanovsky's theory is built so that no event can disconfirm it. When a socialist-oriented state advances, that is the theory vindicated. When one reverses — Egypt under Sadat, Indonesia after 1965, Ghana after the 1966 coup, Somalia sliding into what he calls a "nationalist, would-be socialist orientation" — that is never the theory disconfirmed; it is "betrayal," a "breakdown," the "duplicity of the non-proletarian working masses," the treason of leaders. The reversal is always a moral fact about the actors, never a predictive fact about the doctrine. The question whether this kind of state can reach socialism is applied relentlessly to the colonial world and never once turned back on the framework that keeps answering yes.
This is the discriminating test this series has learned to apply, and Ulyanovsky fails it cleanly. His accusations of "betrayal" attach to no act that the theory itself could be shown to have mispredicted; the theory has arranged in advance that every outcome confirms it. Success is socialist orientation working. Failure is socialist orientation betrayed. There is no state of the world in which the concept was simply wrong — no result Ulyanovsky would accept as evidence that a peasant nation cannot, in fact, be walked into socialism by a colonel and a foreign patron. A theory that cannot lose is not being tested; it is being professed.
The book invites the test all the same, because it names its cases, and because history supplied the answer within a dozen years of publication. Ulyanovsky's roll of socialist-oriented states — Algeria, Syria, Burma, Guinea, South Yemen, Tanzania among the older cases; Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and "recently" Afghanistan among the newer — is a list that the 1990s went through almost name by name.
Egypt, his model of the doctrine's first great advance, had already reversed under Sadat before he wrote; he admits it. Ghana (Nkrumah, 1966) and Mali (Keïta, 1968) he concedes as coups that "interrupted" the road. Guinea's Sékou Touré died in 1984 and the army seized power within a week, opening the country to the market. Burma's "Burmese Way to Socialism" ended in the crushed rising of 1988 and undisguised military rule. Somalia, already downgraded to "would-be socialism," fragmented into state collapse. South Yemen, the one state that pushed furthest toward orthodox Marxism-Leninism, tore itself apart in the party bloodletting of January 1986 and then dissolved into a unified, capitalist Yemen in 1990. Tanzania's ujamaa, the villagisation Ulyanovsky admired, was abandoned as a costly failure and the country turned to market reform from the mid-1980s. Algeria backed away from its socialist course and fell into civil war. Angola and Mozambique — the "far-reaching" socialist orientation of the former Portuguese colonies that Ulyanovsky held up as the doctrine's freshest triumph — formally renounced Marxism-Leninism in 1990–91 after decades of ruinous war, and turned to multiparty capitalism. Ethiopia, the showcase of the sibling volume in this series, collapsed in May 1991: the Derg fell, Mengistu fled, the Workers' Party of Ethiopia evaporated. And Afghanistan, whose accession Ulyanovsky had just recorded, required the Soviet army to survive at all, could not survive with it, and fell in 1992 to the forces its patrons had spent a decade fighting.
Of the roughly fifteen states on which Ulyanovsky rested a twenty-year vindication, essentially none reached socialism. Most reversed to the market; several collapsed into war, coup, or state failure; the fortunes of their peoples ranged from stagnation to catastrophe. This is not the wisdom of hindsight cheaply spent. It is the specific prediction of the specific tradition Ulyanovsky declined to name. The reversals he could categorise only as "betrayal" were, on the permanent-revolution analysis, the foreseeable resolution of a regime that had suspended the class question in a middle that could not hold. What looked to him like a stage on the road to socialism looked to Trotsky's heirs like a military-bureaucratic formation holding down, in the name of an absent working class, the very masses whose struggle had made the revolution — and that is much closer to what the record shows.
None of this touches the part of Ulyanovsky's commitment that was real, and a reader told that the whole book is worthless would be misled. The anti-colonial, anti-imperialist conviction that animates it is genuine and, on its own ground, right. The colonial empires were systems of plunder; their collapse in twenty-five years was one of the great facts of the century; and Ulyanovsky's insistence that political independence without economic independence is a trap — that "neo-colonialist exploitation" through the international monopolies, unequal trade, and aid-as-leverage can reduce a formally free nation to a dependency — has real analytic content and has aged better than much of the modernisation theory that opposed it. On the specific question of who freed these countries, he is a useful corrective to the imperial self-congratulation that held decolonisation to be a gift bestowed; he knew it was taken.
The strongest pages are the closing "Personalities" — the essays on Gandhi, Nehru, Nkrumah, Cabral, and Fanon. These are not tracts but intellectual biographies, and they show a scholar working, not a functionary reciting. The Nkrumah essay in particular is candid in ways the doctrinal chapters are not. Ulyanovsky faults Nkrumah for the "personality cult," for having "got used to governing single-handed and to settling issues by decree," and — most strikingly, from a Soviet author — for lacking "the courage, the faculty of self-criticism and the ability to take an objective, fearless look at his own mistakes." He credits Nkrumah's evolution toward scientific socialism while refusing to pretend the two were identical, and he treats Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism as a serious book. A reader who wants a sympathetic, informed Soviet reading of the mid-century African and Asian nationalist thinkers will find one here, and it is better than the theory it serves.
There is, finally, a biographical fact that gives the whole book its shadow. Ulyanovsky is recorded among the Soviet orientalists who were themselves victims of political repression under Stalin — he appears in the standard biographical dictionary of "orientalists — victims of political terror in the Soviet period." The specifics of his arrest and imprisonment are outside the scope of what can be verified here, and are not asserted; the fact of his inclusion is documented. It is worth stating plainly, and without cruelty. The theory this book advances is a theory of trust in the guiding state — trust that a benevolent apparatus, a vanguard standing above society, can be relied on to carry a people to socialism from above. It was written by a man who had felt, in his own life, what that apparatus was capable of doing to the people in its charge. That is not a debating point against him. It is the human core of the tragedy the series exists to document: the survivors of the machine who went on to theorise its export.
The reply to this book is not a single passage but a tradition, and the reader should follow it into the sibling volumes. Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution carries the doctrine's Ethiopian collapse; Revolution in Laos and The Road to Victory run the same "bypassing capitalism" schema for Indochina; USSR and Countries of Africa applies it across the continent Ulyanovsky theorises. Read against all of them, this volume is the common source, and The Permanent Revolution (1930) — theses 2, 6, and 13 above all — is the common answer, stated in Trotsky's terms before any of these states existed. The Fourth International argued the case contemporaneously as well, on the colonial revolution and the nature of these "workers' and peasants' governments," and the small Trotskyist reviews of African liberation reached, in the 1970s and on the evidence then available, the class characterisation Ulyanovsky could not: not a stage on the road to socialism, but a military-bureaucratic regime wearing socialism's borrowed clothes.
Ulyanovsky was too intelligent a man, and too experienced a one, to have believed this doctrine could not fail. His own text admits that "a turn to capitalism is always possible." What he could not do — what the theory was built to prevent him doing — was to count the turns as evidence rather than as treachery, and to ask whether the fault lay not in the faithless colonels of Mogadishu and Accra but in the idea that had sent the Soviet Union to build socialism through them. The event asked the question for him. Its answer is the subject of this series.