Seven volumes were planned. This is the first, it runs to some 292,000 words, and it stops around 1870. Its subject is Luddism, the Lyons silk-weavers of 1831 and 1834, the Silesian weavers of 1844, Owen's communities, Cabet and Dézamy, Chartism, the League of the Just, the June days in Paris, and the founding of the International Working Men's Association. The publisher is the USSR Academy of Sciences, through its Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, a body set up in Moscow in 1966 to do exactly what its name says. The general editorial committee has twenty-one members. And on the title page, above every one of them: Introduction by Academician B. N. Ponomarev.
That is the fact to hold on to, because nothing in the volume's subject matter would lead you to expect it. Boris Ponomarev was a Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and, for three decades, the head of its International Department — the office that ran Moscow's relations with every communist party outside the Soviet bloc. He is not a scholar who happens to hold rank. He is the rank, writing an introduction, and his introduction is not about the nineteenth century. It is about what the seven volumes are for.
Note the dates first. The Russian text carries a 1976 copyright; the English translation is Progress's, by Yuri Shirokov and Campbell Creighton, dated 1980. The internal evidence agrees with the earlier date. Ponomarev cites the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties of 1969 four times, Brezhnev's Following Lenin's Course in its 1975 Progress edition, and, as the freshest achievement he can name, "the successful completion of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe" — Helsinki, August 1975. The Twenty-Fifth Congress of February 1976 is not mentioned anywhere in the book. So this is a document of the high détente, written at the moment the CPSU believed the terms of the world had been settled in its favour, and it reached English readers in 1980, four months or so after the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan and the settlement collapsed. A sentence like "a turn has been achieved from the cold war to détente, to relations based on the principle of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems" was already a period piece when the English edition was bound.
What is the commission? Ponomarev states it in his second and third pages, and he states it plainly enough that no paraphrase is needed. Marxist scholarship, he concedes, has done well on national labour movements, on the history of socialist thought, on the international organisations. What is missing is synthesis: "the demand for works summing up the international experience of revolutionary labour struggle at its different stages ... works interpreting the past in the interest of the present and future, has not been satisfied and continues to grow." Interpreting the past in the interest of the present and future. That is the brief, issued by the man with the authority to issue it, and it is at least honest. The seven volumes are not commissioned to find out what happened. They are commissioned to supply a usable past to the parties the International Department corresponded with.
The shape of that past is set out in the introduction's central passage, where Ponomarev divides the whole history into periods. Origins to the industrial revolution. The Paris Commune of 1871, opening the next period. The turn of the century and imperialism, when "two currents finally developed in the international working-class movement at the turn of the century: the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist, and the reformist, opportunist one." 1905. Then October 1917, at length. Then the founding of the Communist International in 1919, which gets exactly one sentence: "In 1919 the Communist International was set up, which was called upon to accelerate the formation of revolutionary parties, thereby giving the labour movement the ultimate weapon for victory over capitalism." And then, immediately, this:
The next period in the history of the international labour movement was ushered in by the rout of the fascist Axis powers in the Second World War (1939-1945).
Between those two sentences lie the years 1919 to 1945, and they are not a period. They are a hinge. What falls into the gap is the entire history of the organisation the seven volumes exist to celebrate. The word "Comintern" does not appear in this book. "Communist International" appears three times in 292,000 words, twice in the passage above and once in a doctrinal aside. There is no Third Period and no "social fascism"; no united front; no Popular Front except a single approving reference to the Seventh Congress; no Spain, no POUM, no Nin; no Molotov and no Ribbentrop; no dissolution of the International in May 1943, and no reason given for it, since it is not said to have happened. The name Stalin occurs zero times. So does Hitler's, except once as an adjective — "The defeat of Hitler Germany". The years 1933, 1936 and 1937 appear in this volume only as the imprint dates of books in the footnotes.
A companion introduction in this series made the same count on The World Communist Movement (1973) — Stalin, Hitler, Dimitrov, Cominform, 1943, 1937 all at zero across 158,000 words — and asked whether an Academy of Sciences volume seven years later would do better. The honest answer is that the question is partly unfair to this book and entirely fair to its introduction. Volume One ends in 1870; it has no business discussing 1937. Ponomarev's introduction, by contrast, is a survey of all seven volumes and runs from the sixteenth century to the year of writing, and it is there that the erasure operates. The two books share names on their mastheads. V. V. Zagladin, the International Department official whose presence fixed the institutional address of The World Communist Movement, sits on this book's general editorial committee. So does P. N. Fedoseyev, whom Intercontinental Press in April 1972 named in the same sentence as Ponomarev, pairing his Pravda article of 5 December 1971 with Ponomarev's in Kommunist as "a significant part of this 'ideological' buttressing work". This is not a coincidence of personnel. It is the same office.
One passage in the introduction is worse than silence, because it inverts. Explaining why reformism is dangerous, Ponomarev turns to Germany:
This was the case, for instance, in Germany in the period after the First World War, where the repeated stay of Social-Democracy in power (for more than ten years in all) was followed by the rapid sliding of the political situation to the right, culminating in the government takeover by the Nazi party. This was made possible to no small extent by the myopic position of the then leaders of German Social-Democracy, who had concentrated their efforts on the struggle against the Communist Party and shut their eyes to the actual, mortal danger from the right.
Every clause of the indictment is true of the SPD leadership, and every clause is also true of the KPD, which is the party the sentence exists to protect. Concentrating one's efforts on the struggle against the other workers' party while shutting one's eyes to the danger from the right is a precise description of the line adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, hardened at the Tenth Plenum of its Executive in 1929, and enforced on the German party from Moscow: that social democracy and fascism were twins, and that a united front against Hitler was therefore excluded in principle. The KPD polled just under six million votes in November 1932 and was destroyed within months of 30 January 1933 without a general strike being called. The charge Ponomarev levels at the SPD is the charge the anti-Stalinist left levelled at both parties while it could still have mattered, and the sustained version of it is in Trotsky's German writings of 1930–33, of which the 1932 pamphlet What Next? is the central text. Nothing in this book acknowledges that the argument was ever made.
The name Trotsky occurs exactly three times in 292,000 words, and only once as a man. In the chapter on the development of Marxism in the 1850s and early 1860s, the discussion of uninterrupted revolution turns aside to say that Trotsky "advanced the adventuristic scheme of progress by leaps over its developmental stages", and that his denial of socialism in one country was "tantamount to an appeal for the restoration of capitalism in Soviet Russia." That formula — dissent as a plea for capitalist restoration — is the formula of the Moscow Trials, printed by an Academy institute in a book about the eighteen-forties. The second occurrence, two paragraphs later, convicts the Chinese leadership of having "fully embraced the Trotskyite variety of 'permanent revolution'" and of using it "to justify the purge of sound proletarian forces opposed to Maoism" — the only place in the volume where a communist party is said to have purged communists, and, exactly as in The World Communist Movement, it is about China. The third is the chapter on the ideological struggle, where the "intolerance" charge against Marx, first made by Bakunin, is said to have had "their ranks reinforced by neo-anarchists, neo-Trotskyists, and Maoists".
More striking is the machinery that surrounds the name without using it. Ponomarev devotes several pages to "left" opportunism, and gives it a checklist: ostentatious slogans, adventurism, "social orientation on the petty-bourgeois strata and the lumpen-proletariat", hostility to the organised mass of the working class. He then joins the two deviations at the hip: "Their most typical common platform is anti-communism and anti-Sovietism." Anyone who has read the Soviet polemical literature of the previous decade will recognise the apparatus. It was Ponomarev who built it. In Kommunist No. 18 for 1971 he published a twenty-one-page article, subtitled "Trotskyism — Weapon of Anti-Communism", over the designation Sekretar' TsK KPSS, and it set the directives that the specialist anti-Trotskyist authors of the 1970s then executed. The Fourth International noticed at once. George Saunders reviewed it in Intercontinental Press on 24 January 1972 under the heading "Ponomarev's Directives on How to Meet Growing Threat of Resurgent 'Trotskyism'", observing that "the Kremlin leaders have made a major move to upgrade the status of the anti-Trotskyist campaign", that the rank was displayed so that "no one will underestimate the importance of the article", and that the essay's real message was defensive: "The main thrust of Ponomarev's article can be paraphrased this way: 'The Trotskyists are not more to the left than we are.'" The same footnote lists a decade of prior Soviet attacks by Basmanov, Mikeshin, Ognev and Suslov. The man who wrote that article wrote this introduction, four or five years later, in a calmer register and for a more respectable audience. The categories did not change.
Now set the introduction aside, because the book underneath it is a different thing altogether, and a reader told otherwise would be badly served.
Volume One is real historical scholarship, and in places it is excellent. It rests on primary sources — the Northern Star for 21 May and 9 July 1842, The Times for 3 and 4 May 1842, the London Chartist Monthly Magazine, Chartist Tracts for the Times (Leeds, 1850), Der Bund der Kommunisten: Dokumente und Materialien, and manuscript material from the Central Party Archives — and it argues with the international literature rather than ignoring it. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is cited a dozen times and treated as authoritative; on the Manchester massacre of 1819 the book says outright that "The progressive British historian E. P. Thompson quite reasonably said about the Peterloo events: 'There is no term for this but class war.'" Hobsbawm supplies the power-loom figures, the argument of "The Machine-Breakers" and the comparison in Primitive Rebels; Malcolm Thomis's The Luddites (1970) is cited beside Thompson on machine-breaking; George Rudé is used on the social composition of the Paris crowds, Albert Soboul on the sans-culottes, Mathiez, the Hammonds, the Webbs, G. D. H. Cole, Jürgen Kuczynski, Norman Ware on the American industrial worker. Whatever else it is, this is not a book written by people who read only in Russian.
The Chartist chapters are the best thing in it. They are unsentimental in a way the introduction never is. Chartism is called "a kind of a prologue to the later history of the international working-class movement", but the chapter on Chartist ideology then says squarely that "The Chartists, however, could not explain scientifically the essence of capitalist exploitation", that they took the propertied monopoly of the suffrage to be the sole source of injustice, and that the social order they envisaged "was to incorporate many major categories of bourgeois society: private property, wage labour and capital, purchase and sale of labour power." It quotes the National Petition of 1842 promising "the security of property and the prosperity of commerce", and the Manchester mechanics' address asking for "security to capital" and "confidence and good-will betwixt employers and workmen". It also refuses the condescension that usually accompanies such findings: "The Chartists had never been maniacs obsessed with one idea. They supported the struggle against capital." That is a historian's sentence, not a functionary's.
There is one attribution worth querying. The book claims that "Chartism won a great achievement for the working class — the legislative institution of a 10-hour working day in June 1847", conceding in the same breath that the Act formally covered only women and young persons. The Act of June 1847 was the fruit of the Ten Hours campaign, a cross-class alliance that ran alongside Chartism and often against it, and its effect was largely defeated by relay working until the amending Act of 1850. The credit is real but it is not Chartism's alone, and the book's habit of collapsing every gain into the account of the proletariat as such is the one place where its politics visibly bends its evidence. A smaller instance: in the chapter on utopian socialism, the section on Russia runs to eight pages and the section on the United States to two, in a period when Russia's proletariat barely existed and America's did.
The volume's other genuine surprise is that it narrates a split honestly. After the defeats of 1848 the Communist League divided, and the book names the faction — "the Schapper-Willich faction" — and quotes Marx's own words against the minority from the Central Committee meeting of 15 September 1850: "The point of view of the minority is dogmatic instead of critical, idealistic instead of materialistic." It then follows the sequel through police testimony of December 1853. Compare the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's unsigned preface to The Hague Congress of the First International (Progress, 1976), examined elsewhere in this series, which contrives across nine pages never to tell the reader that Bakunin was expelled. This book does not have that problem in Part Two, and where Bakunin is concerned it does not yet have the opportunity: the volume stops in 1870, two years short of The Hague.
What it does with Bakunin in the meantime is hostile but mostly factual. The account of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy is accurate on the sequence — the open Alliance refused admission by the General Council because it claimed to be an independent international organisation, the Geneva section admitted once the Alliance was declared dissolved, the secret Alliance behind it, the Jura sections, the Chaux-de-Fonds congress of 1870 — and it concedes more than it had to. Bakuninism, we are told, "had a dual and contradictory character", expressing the state of mind of masses "rightless, and impoverished by the development of large-scale industry". What the account cannot allow is that Bakunin joined the International for any reason of his own: "Right from the start, however, he regarded the International's already formed organisation simply as a field for his activity." The motive is settled in advance, and the reader is spared the trouble of weighing it. The register that will govern Volume Two is visible in the later chapter, where the line runs from Bakunin's followers directly to "neo-anarchists, neo-Trotskyists, and Maoists" who "are trying to erect schisms and splits into a 'law' of the proletarian movements' evolution." One nineteenth-century quarrel, one twentieth-century enemies list.
Where should a reader go for the other side? For the period this volume actually covers, sparsely — the anti-Stalinist left wrote less about Chartism than about anything else, and the archives that accompany this series contain almost nothing on it. Trotsky's fullest treatment, Where Is Britain Going? (1925), is not in them. What survives in fragments is worth having anyway, because it is the same judgement reached without the apparatus. In "Through What Stage Are We Passing?" (1924) he describes how "there developed in the second third of last century the stormy movement of the working class which is known as Chartism", and explains its failure by the maturity and world power of the British bourgeoisie, "crumbs from which it shared with the upper strata of the working class". In "The British Election and the Communists" (10 November 1931) he sets the English worker's deference against his insurrectionary capacity — a class that "drags in its thoughts" a load of "humiliation, conservatism, bigotry, conciliation" and is "at the same time capable of grand revolutionary insurrections (Chartism, pre-war movements of 1911, movements following the war, the strike movements of 1926)". Three days earlier, in "Tasks of the Left Opposition in England and India", he wrote of the trade unions that "They gloriously participated in the Chartist Movement" and that "A number of trade unions entered the First International." Where the two traditions disagree is not about the facts of 1838 or 1848.
They disagree about what a revolutionary organisation may do to its minorities, and about whether history may be written backwards from the verdict. For the first, the honest place to start is the Hague documents themselves, which this series also republishes. For the second — for the specific charge that Ponomarev's book makes in passing about leaping over stages — the reply was published in 1928 and is in this series' library: The Third International After Lenin, chapter III, where Trotsky answers the Executive Committee of the Comintern for "condemning mechanically any 'skipping over the bourgeois-democratic stage' and by endeavoring to guide the historical process in accordance with circular letters", and asks the question the 1976 formula still cannot face: "If we are to understand by the bourgeois-democratic stage, the accomplishment of the agrarian revolution by means of a 'democratic dictatorship,' then it was the October Revolution itself that audaciously 'skipped' over the bourgeois-democratic stage. Should it not be condemned for it?"
One last negative finding, and it is not to the Fourth International's credit. The Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, its director T. T. Timofeyev, and this seven-volume edition are not mentioned once in Intercontinental Press across the whole run from 1968 to 1986, nor in International Viewpoint, nor in Inprecor. Ponomarev the polemicist was read and answered within weeks. Ponomarev the commissioning editor of a serious history of the nineteenth-century workers' movement went unnoticed. The polemics were easier to fight, and they were the part of the operation that mattered least.
Read Ponomarev's thirty-odd pages, then, as what they are: an unusually candid statement of what a state wanted a history to be for, signed by the official who wanted it. Then turn to page 41 and read the historians. They were working under him, they knew what could not be written, and within the years they were given — 1500 to 1870, where no faction had a stake and no one had been shot for a wrong answer — they did the job properly. It is the only volume of the seven where that was possible, and the reason it was possible is the reason the introduction had to be written by someone else.