This book is not a book. It is a ceremony, set in type. Behind the English title Triumph of Lenin's Ideas stands the stenographic record of a state occasion: the International Scientific Conference on the 60th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, held in Moscow from 10 to 12 November 1977 under the joint auspices of four institutions of the Soviet ideological apparatus — the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee, the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee, and the Higher Party School. Its Russian title, Torzhestvo leninskikh idei, could equally be rendered as the celebration of Lenin's ideas, and celebration is the exact register. The editorial board — P. N. Fedoseyev, A. G. Yegorov, M. T. Iovchuk and E. M. Chekharin — were not authors but masters of ceremonies; Fedoseyev, Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences and one of the CPSU's senior academician-ideologues, closes the volume himself with a set-piece on international solidarity. What lies between the covers is a succession of speeches, opened by Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo's grey cardinal of ideology, and delivered in turn by Boris Ponomarev, by Gus Hall of the American party, by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez of Cuba, by Luis Corvalán of Chile, and by two dozen leaders of the fraternal parties. To read it is to sit in the hall.
For this series the dating question is usually the first puzzle, because Progress translations lag their Russian originals by years and the catalogue records only the translation. Here there is no puzzle. The text is fixed to a fortnight in November 1977 and issued in English in 1978, and everything in it turns on two events barely a month old: the adoption of the new Soviet Constitution — the "Brezhnev Constitution" — on 7 October 1977, and Brezhnev's own anniversary report. This is the rare volume where the date on the spine and the date of the thought are the same. That precision is a gift, because it lets us read the book's confidence against the calendar of what was actually happening to the society it praises.
And what was happening, in November 1977, was the quiet beginning of the end. The Soviet economists would later have a name for the Brezhnev years — zastoi, stagnation — but it was a name the regime could not use while the years were in progress, and this book is the sound of the regime at the top of its voice just as the deceleration set in. Growth rates were falling; the leadership was ageing into the gerontocracy that would bury three general secretaries in twenty-eight months; the invasion of Afghanistan that would shatter the détente the speeches celebrate was two years off and wholly unforeseen here. Georges Cogniot of the French party, recalling his first visit half a century before, tells the hall that the Soviet economy "was developing at unprecedented rates and was free of crises." He is describing, in the present tense, an economy that had entered its long slide. The book's certainty is not a lie so much as a dated instrument: it reads the present moment as the threshold of "the century of worldwide victories," and announces that "the October Revolution will be the victorious banner not only of the twentieth, but also of the twenty-first century." We are now well into that century, and the state whose triumph the book proclaims did not survive to see its own seventy-fourth anniversary.
The doctrine the volume exists to broadcast has a name of its own: developed socialism, or "mature socialism." This was the Brezhnev leadership's central theoretical innovation, and one should be clear about what it was for. Khrushchev had promised, at the 22nd Congress in 1961, that the present generation of Soviet people would "live under communism" — that communism would be substantially built by 1980. That promise was visibly not going to be kept. "Developed socialism" was the doctrine that let the leadership retire the deadline without admitting a failure: the USSR was declared to have reached a durable, mature stage between socialism and communism, a plateau that could be occupied indefinitely. Brezhnev's own formula, quoted approvingly in the volume, defines it as the "stage of maturity of the new society at which the restructuring of the entire system of social relations on the collectivist principles intrinsic to socialism is being completed." The word "completed" is doing heavy lifting: it converts an unfulfilled prophecy into an accomplished condition. The new Constitution is the doctrine's monument, and the speeches return to it again and again — as the charter that "confirms that socialism alone guarantees human rights," as the "Fundamental Law" in which even the foreign policy of peaceful coexistence has now been inscribed.
It is on the question of the state that the volume walks, unknowing, straight into Lenin. The Constitution it celebrates gives legal form to a phrase repeated throughout the book as a doctrinal advance: the transformation of "the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat into a socialist state of the whole people." Suslov calls the "growth of the Party's influence and enhancement of its leading role" the "key factor in the progress of our society," and names the Party "the organising nucleus and backbone of the country's entire socio-political life." Here the book is at its proudest — and here it is furthest from the man in whose name it is assembled.
Turn to Lenin's The State and Revolution, written in the weeks before October 1917, the text that more than any other defined what the revolution was for. Its argument is that the proletarian revolution is distinguished precisely by its assault on the state as a machine standing above society — that it will, in Lenin's words as his sharpest reader reproduced them, "abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus raised above society — and above all, a police and standing army." Lenin's programme for the officials of the new order was concrete and severe: "not only election but recall at any time," and "payment no higher than the wages of a worker," so that administration should never harden into a separate caste. The state was to begin withering from the morning after the seizure of power. Measure the volume against that standard. It celebrates not the withering of the state but its consecration in a new Constitution; not the recall of officials but the "enhancement" of the Party's monopoly; not administrators on a worker's wage but a permanent apparatus — the very "state of the whole people" that Lenin's argument says should by now scarcely exist. The book flies the banner of a text whose every demand its own subject has reversed.
That reversal did not go unanswered in its own time; it was answered forty years before this conference sat, by the one contemporary who had watched the transformation from inside and been exiled and hunted for describing it. Leon Trotsky — chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, organiser of the insurrection and of the Red Army, and after 1923 the leader of the Left Opposition against the rising bureaucracy — set out in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) the analysis this volume is constructed to forbid. Trotsky had read the same State and Revolution, and he saw exactly the cult that this book performs: "the Soviet idolators," he wrote, "with their cult of a bureaucratic state which has not the slightest intention of 'dying away.'" Against the previous Soviet Constitution, Stalin's of 1936 — celebrated in its day in the same language this volume lavishes on the Constitution of 1977 — Trotsky wrote that it marked "an immense step back from socialist to bourgeois principles," of a piece with "the resurrection of ranks and decorations, and the growth of inequality." His portrait of the society beneath the phrases is the direct rejoinder to every claim in this book about the "state of the whole people": a stratum whose members "occupy lordly apartments, enjoy several summer homes in various parts of the country, have the best automobiles at their disposal, and have long ago forgotten how to shine their own shoes," set against those who "do not shine their own shoes only because they go barefoot." A volume that proclaims a state of the whole people is answered, before it speaks, by the demonstration that the state belonged to a part of the people and served that part. This is not the introduction's invention; it is the standing reply of the tradition from which this series is written, and it was in print, in most of the languages of the world, four decades before the delegates took their seats.
There is a second way the book betrays its own subject, and it is a matter of who is not in the room. This is a 55,000-word volume on the history and world significance of the October Revolution. The name Trotsky does not appear in it once. Nor, as the leader of a rival tendency airbrushed from the record — that would at least be an argument — but as a non-person: the man who chaired the soviet that took power and commanded the army that held it has been removed from the story of the revolution he helped to make. The erasure is not selective spite; it is systemic. Search the volume for Stalin, the leader under whom the state now being celebrated was in fact built into its mature form, and you find him exactly once — inside the place-name "Stalingrad." Both the co-leader of October and the builder of the system have been edited out, and what remains is a Leninism suspended in mid-air, claimed by a leadership that traces its authority to a revolution it cannot narrate and a construction it cannot name. The book knows Lenin had a testament — his final dictated "Letter to the Congress" of the winter of 1922–23, which warned the Party against the concentration of power in Stalin's hands and urged his removal from the post of General Secretary — but that document belongs to the same suppressed history, and the volume that celebrates "the Party of Lenin" and hails "that outstanding Marxist-Leninist, Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev" cannot afford to remember it.
Where the book does allow conflict onto the page, it does so in the language of anathema, and this is the most historically revealing thing in it — because the movement it calls united is audibly coming apart in its own table of contents. Two dissents are named and cursed. The first is China: the "great-power and chauvinist policies of the Chinese leaders" are denounced as "their betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and of proletarian internationalism," Maoism as a doctrine that failed and turned to collusion with imperialism. The second is Eurocommunism — the assertion by the large Western parties, above all the Italian, Spanish and French, of independent national roads and a break with the Soviet model. Ponomarev dismisses it as "the propaganda ballyhoo about Eurocommunism, a concept invented by the bourgeoisie," a fiction manufactured to sow discord where only unity exists.
But listen to the speeches themselves. Georges Cogniot, for the French Communist Party, tells the Moscow hall that his party intends "to establish a socialist system with the 'national colours of France' in our country, excluding any mechanical copying of various models and patterns." Leonte Rautu, for the Romanians, insists that relations between parties rest "on the basis of their full equality, mutual respect, autonomy, and independence." These are Eurocommunist and national-communist propositions, stated to Moscow's face at Moscow's own jubilee. The "unity" the conference exists to affirm is fracturing along the very seam the organisers deny exists; the heresy Ponomarev calls a bourgeois invention is being professed from the rostrum by the fraternal delegates. Fedoseyev's closing insistence that "there has never been, nor can there be ... any antagonistic contradiction between the national interests of a people, of a Communist Party, and the international interests of the world revolutionary movement" is not a description of the movement in the hall. It is a wish, contradicted by the transcript it concludes. Within thirteen years the movement it presided over would have no centre to be loyal to.
The book's handling of the invasions that held that centre together is the same erasure by vocabulary. Hungary 1956 appears only as a "counter-revolutionary uprising" corrected by "the new leadership headed by Comrade Janos Kadar" — the leadership Soviet tanks installed. Czechoslovakia 1968 appears as the work of "right-wing opportunists in the Party, who made use of the counter-revolutionary forces still remaining in our society" and sought "to corrupt the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and turn it into a petty-bourgeois reformist party of a social-democratic type." In neither account does a Soviet soldier appear. The Warsaw Pact intervention of August 1968 — the largest military operation in Europe since 1945, the event that made the word "normalisation" a euphemism — is simply not present; the reform movement that half a million troops were sent to crush is dissolved into "opportunism," and the crushing is not mentioned at all. The silence about the tanks is the finding.
Two of this series' standing tests apply, and both return the expected result. The first concerns peaceful coexistence, the doctrine the volume repeatedly presents as Lenin's foreign policy, now written into the Constitution. Across the book the phrase appears ten times — attributed to the 24th Congress's Peace Programme, to Brezhnev's reports, to the Fundamental Law — and not once inside a quotation from Lenin. The nearest the volume comes is a paraphrase in an author's own voice, that Lenin foresaw "a whole epoch of confrontations and coexistence between these states and the capitalist world" — which is not the slogan and not a quotation. This is now the third Soviet foreign-policy volume in which the pedigree of "peaceful coexistence" is asserted in the editors' voice and never demonstrated from Lenin's pen; the doctrine is real Soviet policy, but its Leninist parentage is a claim the books cannot cash. The second test is reflexive. The volume deploys "opportunism" freely — against the Chinese, against social-democrats, against unnamed deviations of "right and 'left'" — but the category is never once turned on the speaker. The Party is always the subject combating opportunism and never the object of the charge; the accusation is never attached to a described act of the CPSU's own that could be shown not to have happened. A word that can be aimed only outward is a badge, not an analysis.
None of this means the volume is worthless, and this series does not pretend that it is. As a document it is of the first importance: a dated photograph of the world communist movement at its numerical height and its political noon, with the fracture lines already visible to anyone willing to read the delegates against their host. And where the book transmits real Lenin, it should be credited. Its insistence that the revolutionary process would be "longer and more tortuous" than the nineteenth-century image of a single continental upheaval, that it would proceed through "a series of revolutions in different countries" beginning in lands "backward economically" — that is a genuine and important correction of ultra-left immediatism, and it is Lenin's own. Its anti-colonial dimension is not merely rhetorical: the solidarity the speeches voice with the liberation struggles of southern Africa, and the material support the Soviet state actually gave them, belong to the real and creditable side of this history. And the book preserves, in Fedoseyev's closing speech, a defensible point buried under the pieties — that internationalism did not lose its class content by widening its base. A reader who is told the whole volume is fraud learns nothing; the honest account is that a real strand of Lenin runs through it, wrapped around a doctrine of the state that is Lenin turned inside out.
That doctrine is the thing to read the book for, and to read it against. The reply the volume forbids itself is not obscure and not lost. It is Lenin's The State and Revolution, whose demands the "state of the whole people" quietly annuls; it is Lenin's suppressed "Letter to the Congress," which named the danger the book cannot; and it is above all Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, the sustained analysis of how a workers' state acquired a ruling bureaucracy that called its own rule the people's, and its own permanence the withering-away of the state. Set the two texts side by side and the triumph the title announces resolves into something more precise and more melancholy: the triumph of the apparatus over the revolution it claimed, spoken in the confident present tense at the very moment the ground beneath it had begun, silently, to give way.