The book is called Unity, Solidarity, Internationalism. It went to English readers in 1981, the year Poland had ten million people in an independent trade union, the Soviet army was in its second winter in Afghanistan, the Italian party was two years from the strappo, and the two largest communist parties on earth had not been on speaking terms for two decades. Boris Leibzon set out to explain how the world communist movement holds together. He wrote 81,000 words and the word Solidarność does not appear in any spelling.
That is not quite the indictment it looks like, and getting the date right is the first job. The spine says 1981; the text is substantially a 1979 manuscript. The evidence is in the footnotes. Leibzon cites thirty-five sources datelined 1979 — World Marxist Review for March and April 1979 alone carry more than a dozen of his references — and then, across the remaining 400 pages of his own apparatus, exactly one source from 1980 (Pravda, 1 January) and three from 1981, of which two are the same document: the Central Committee Report to the 26th Congress, and Pravda of 28 February 1981 reprinting it. The last world event narrated in the book is China's attack on Vietnam in February 1979. The Conclusion's peroration on the arms race is grafted onto a Congress that met from 23 February 1981; everything under it was written before the Gdańsk shipyard gates closed.
Two details show a hand did pass over the manuscript later. Josip Broz Tito, quoted from the 1976 Berlin conference, is introduced as "the late Josip Broz Tito" — Tito died on 4 May 1980. And the 26th Congress citations could not have been added before late February 1981. So this is not a book that simply predates the Polish August. Someone touched it after Tito's death and again after the 26th Congress, had the opportunity to say something about the largest independent workers' movement in the history of the Soviet bloc, and inserted a death-notice and a Congress reference instead. The nil return on Poland 1980 is a finding about the revision, not about the original draft — which is a narrower claim than it first appears, and a sharper one.
Leibzon himself is identifiable from the book's own back cover: "Professor Boris Leibzon of the Moscow Academy of Social Sciences is a leading Soviet authority on the international communist movement." The Academy of Social Sciences was the CPSU Central Committee's own graduate institution, and Leibzon was a Comintern historian working from party archives. That is the commission: the movement's official historian, writing the official history of its cohesion, for export.
Which makes the comparison with his previous appearance in this series unusually informative. In 1977 Leibzon co-wrote The Revolutionary Vanguard with Mikhail Basmanov, the Soviet apparatus's professional answerer of Trotskyists. That book is 92,620 words. It uses the vocabulary of opportunism — opportunism, opportunist, opportunists, opportunistically — 81 times, a rate of 8.75 per 10,000 words against a corpus average across the 195 Progress volumes held here of 1.55. It names Trotsky 131 times, and ten of those sit within 120 characters of an opportunism word. It never once writes the name Stalin.
Leibzon alone in 1981 inverts almost all of it. The opportunism family drops to 23 occurrences, 2.84 per 10,000 — a threefold fall, and now within sight of the catalogue average. Trotsky appears once, as "leftist, anarchist and Trotskyite elements" whom Peking is accused of trying to activate. Not one opportunism word in the book stands within 120 characters of Trotsky's name. And Stalin, absent from the 1977 volume entirely, is here — once, as a man rather than a battle:
Stalin's personality cult and unjustified repressions, which also involved foreign Communists staying in the Soviet Union, did great harm to the communist movement.
The sentence is footnoted to Suslov. Khrushchev's name does not occur in the book, and the 20th Congress is mentioned exactly once, inside a quotation from Togliatti about polycentrism. The CPSU's own reckoning with Stalin reaches this book only through a dead Italian's aside. Still: the machinery the 1977 draft in this series identified — the sorting of the world by the "vanguard" test, powered by a Trotskyist bogey — is largely dismantled here. Whatever else Leibzon is doing in 1981, he is not writing Basmanov's book. The enemy has been swapped. Maoism carries the polemical load now: Maoist 22 times, Peking 16, Chinese 20.
The 1977 draft observed that Santiago Carrillo's name did not appear in The Revolutionary Vanguard. That holds — I checked it against the misspellings too, and Carrillo, Eurocommunism and Euro-communism all return zero there. In 1981 he appears, and the manner of his appearance is the best thing in the book. Leibzon quotes "Eurocomunismo" y Estado — the book Moscow's New Times denounced by name in June 1977 — and quotes it for the defence. Carrillo is produced as a witness that the CPSU never gave orders:
I do not recall a single change of position, a single important political decision, which, since that dissolution, was co-ordinated by our Party with the CPSU in advance.
(The footnote prints the author as "Carillo" and the title as "Euro-commanismo"; both are scanning damage and I have corrected them silently here. A word-boundary search on the correct spelling returns nothing, which is a warning worth passing on: the false nil was mine before it was anyone else's.)
The same conscription is performed on the others. Berlinguer appears six times and is friendly in all six — at Berlin in 1976, saying "the demand for internationalism resounds more compulsively than ever"; in an October 1978 communiqué agreeing that differences need not hinder co-operation. Marchais appears twice, both times constructively proposing new forms of collective meeting. Eurocommunism itself is named once, and buried:
the bourgeois and reformist press made no secret of the fact that life had dashed its hopes
for it. This is a real change of method from 1977, and it deserves to be named as one. The earlier book argued against the Eurocommunists through proxies — Garaudy, Fischer, Il Manifesto — men their own parties had expelled, so that the dispute could be conducted without admitting it existed. The 1981 book abandons the proxies and instead absorbs the principals. Berlinguer, Marchais and Carrillo are all quoted, none is answered, and each is made to testify to a unity he was in the process of leaving. It is a more confident technique and a more dishonest one.
Now the silences that count, by the rule that an absence is evidence only where the author had the fact and a reason to use it.
Czechoslovakia 1968. The book has a chapter section defending the term "socialist internationalism" against a specific charge, and the charge is worth stating in full because Leibzon states it honestly:
in the 1970s, the communist press in some European countries came up with statements that the "socialist internationalism" concept was formulated only in 1968 to designate a special type of internationalism allegedly "superior" to the internationalist relations among the other Communist Parties.
That is the accusation that the doctrine Western journalists called the Brezhnev Doctrine was invented to license the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Leibzon's reply is entirely bibliographic. The term was first used in the Declaration of the 1957 Moscow Meeting, therefore it was not invented in 1968; and "Socialist internationalism is not some superior type of internationalism, but the very same proletarian internationalism". A political charge about tanks is met with a citation to a document. Five Warsaw Pact armies crossed the frontier of a fellow socialist state in August 1968, and in a book about the principles governing relations between communist parties the event does not occur. Warsaw Pact returns zero. Invasion returns zero. The word 1968 appears eight times, and the only one that touches the Prague Spring is this:
the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Communists note that one of the reasons for the crisis phenomena in Hungary (1956) and in Czechoslovakia (1968) was the influx of petty-bourgeois elements into their Parties.
Two crushed revolutions, twelve years apart, explained as a recruitment problem. This is the same manoeuvre the 1977 volume performed, and the 1981 version is thinner: Leibzon has dropped even the long Husák quotation his co-authored book used to pad it out. The finding replicates and it deteriorates.
Afghanistan. Named once, and the sentence is a fossil of the manuscript's real date:
The victory of the democratic people's revolution in Afghanistan
— the Saur coup of April 1978, praised for producing a sense of community with the world liberation struggle. Of the December 1979 entry of Soviet troops there is nothing. This is worth stating carefully, because a sibling brief in this series once predicted that a Soviet foreign-policy book of the early 1980s could not name Afghanistan and was refuted by a book that named it twenty times and defended the intervention explicitly. Leibzon does not defend it and does not deny it. He wrote before it and did not go back. In a volume whose whole subject is what one socialist state may do about another's internal affairs, that is the omission with the most weight on it.
Yugoslavia 1948. The Cominform's expulsion of the Yugoslav party — the first and most consequential rupture in the postwar movement — is mentioned once, and not in Leibzon's voice. It survives only inside a parenthesis in a Togliatti quotation, "the break (in 1948) with the League of Communists of Yugoslavia", offered as one reason the Information Bureau underperformed. Leibzon uses the neutral name "Information Bureau" fifteen times and "Cominform" twice. The anti-Titoist campaign that followed, and the show trials it produced across Eastern Europe, are absent: Rajk, Kostov, Slánský all return zero. So do executed and executions; the single occurrence of shot is metaphorical, inside a quotation from Jaurès.
Which brings me to the passage that concentrates the book's whole method into four lines, and which I think is the most important thing in it. Leibzon reports, accurately, the statement of February 1956 in which five parties reviewed the Comintern Executive's decision to dissolve the Communist Party of Poland:
That decision was declared unjustified and the data, on the strength of which it had been adopted, fictitious and doctored by provocateurs.
Every word of that is true. The KPP was dissolved in 1938 on fabricated evidence. What Leibzon does not write is that the party's leaders were summoned to Moscow and shot, that the fabricators worked for the Soviet security organs, or that the Comintern Executive was executing an instruction. He records the forgery and deletes the forger. And then he tells the reader what the episode means: the 1956 statement "was seen by the Communist Parties as a step in strengthening trust among the Parties, ensuring respect for their sovereignty". A national section of the International was destroyed and its leadership liquidated, and the lesson is a confidence-building measure. The fact is admitted, the agency is deleted, the moral is administrative. Once you have seen that shape you see it everywhere in the book.
None of which makes it a worthless volume, and I want to be precise about what is good in it, because the credibility of everything above depends on it.
Leibzon is a real archival historian and roughly the middle third of this book is institutional history that is genuinely hard to obtain in English. He gives the composition of the Comintern Executive as fixed by the First and Second Congresses, and the sixteen countries and regions granted full voting powers. He reconstructs the whole diplomacy of the 1957, 1960 and 1969 international meetings: the 26-party commission set up after the Romanian congress and sitting from 1 to 22 October 1960; the Karlovy Vary conference of 24–26 April 1967 with its attendance and, more usefully, its list of absentees — Yugoslavia, Romania, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Albania; the drafting subgroup of eight parties for the Berlin conference and the number of times its editorial commission met. He records that Mao endorsed the 1957 Declaration in public at Moscow University and disparaged international meetings at Tsingtao on 20 July 1957 in a speech the Chinese press did not print. Whatever one makes of the framing, this is a scholar using archives, and the anti-Stalinist tradition has no comparable narrative of these bodies.
More than that: he states the real problem honestly, and section 3 of this series' brief obliges me to say so. How does an international movement bind its members without one party commanding the rest? That was the Fourth International's problem too, and it has never been comfortably solved by anyone. Leibzon's answer is drawn from Lenin on the Stuttgart Congress of 1907:
Formally, the decisions of the international congresses are not binding on the individual nations, but their moral significance is such that the non-observance of decisions is, in fact, an exception
— and Leibzon's own gloss is that even under the Comintern, whose decisions were formally binding, Lenin stressed "not the organisational, but the moral aspect" of that obligation. That is a serious reading, and it is close to right. He then reports, with real fairness, the procedural argument at the Budapest consultative meeting and the 1969 Moscow meeting about whether decisions must be unanimous. He gives the case against unanimity in the words of the Argentine communist Rodolfo Ghioldi, who said the meeting "does not represent a single centre, though this does not mean that it is being conducted anarchistically, or that the minority can impose its opinion on the majority". And he reports the mechanism the parties settled on:
when a Party disagrees with a draft decision, its dissenting opinion is written into the protocol, the Party having the right to sign only that part of the document with which it agrees.
That is a genuine institutional invention and Leibzon is right to be interested in it. A reader who wants to understand how the 1969 document came to be signed in fragments will learn it here and almost nowhere else.
The trouble is what the argument cannot survive contact with. A doctrine of purely moral international discipline is a fine thing in a movement of parties out of power. It becomes something else when one of the parties commands the largest army in Europe and has twice used it inside the movement's own territory. Leibzon's book never puts those two facts in the same room. The moral-obligation theory is developed at length in chapter III; the tanks are not in the book at all.
The answer from the other side of the split is locatable, contemporaneous, and unusually well matched to this particular volume. On the Comintern's inner history — the years Leibzon spent in the archives — Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin (1928) is the direct ancestor of this critique, and it attacks precisely Leibzon's claim that the Comintern fostered its sections' independence. Trotsky's account of the "Bolshevization" of 1924 is that "A revolver was held at the temples of the leading organs of the communist parties with the demand that they adopt immediately a final position on the internal disputes in the CPSU without any information and any discussion" (ch. II, part 4), and that the Executive Committee was repeatedly reconstructed by the CPSU leadership "in complete disregard of the statutes of the Comintern" (ch. IV, part 1) — the same statutes Leibzon quotes. Trotsky's underlying objection is the one Leibzon's title raises and never confronts: that "the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism" (ch. I, part 1).
On the Sino-Soviet split, which is chapter II's real subject, the Fourth International's own assessment was adopted at its Eighth World Congress in June 1965 and printed as "The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Crisis of the International Communist Movement", International Socialist Review vol. 27 no. 2 (Whole No. 175), Spring 1966, pp. 76–85. It is not a partisan document for either capital. It criticises Peking on five named counts, beginning with "Peking's campaign to rehabilitate Stalin", and it makes the point Leibzon's institutional narrative is designed to obscure — that the pro-Peking bloc was internally various "despite the facade of monolithic unity". Two hostile analyses of the same object, arriving from opposite directions, tell a reader more than either alone.
On the 1969 Moscow meeting, which Leibzon's contents page calls a "Major Victory of Internationalism", the contemporaneous report is "Moscow Conference Deepens Split with Peking", Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 24, 23 June 1969. The same issue prints something Leibzon's chapter has no room for: the appeal of 1 June 1969 from ten Soviet civil-rights activists — several of them party members, one the wife of the imprisoned Major General Pyotr Grigorenko — addressed to the delegates then assembling in the Kremlin. It opens: "We are appealing to the international conference of Communist and workers parties in regard to the revival of Stalinist methods in our country." On 6 June, while the conference sat, five Crimean Tatars and Pyotr Yakir's twenty-year-old daughter demonstrated near Red Square and were arrested. Leibzon devotes a chapter section to that conference. None of this is in it.
And on Poland, where the book's silence is loudest, Intercontinental Press covered the August strikes weekly and from inside. See Ernest Harsch, "Polish Workers Score Major Victory", and Jean-Yves Touvais, "How the Polish Strikers Are Organizing", with the full text of the 21 Demands of the Gdańsk strikers, in vol. 18 no. 33, 8 September 1980; Gerry Foley's "Free Unions Open New Stage in Workers' Struggle" and "35 Years of Struggle for Workers' Democracy and Socialism", together with "Kremlin Blames 'Antisocialist Elements'", in vol. 18 no. 34, 15 September 1980; and the interview with Anna Walentynowicz, the crane operator whose sacking began the Gdańsk strike, in vol. 19 no. 21, 8 June 1981 — she is the worker whose sacking, in Intercontinental Press's words, "precipitated the Gdansk strike of August 1980". (These scans carry a systematic b→h substitution; I have corrected it silently where quoting.) The point is not merely that Leibzon is silent. It is that an independent trade union of ten million members in a socialist country was the single most searching test the doctrine of socialist internationalism had ever faced, and this book — revised, demonstrably, while it was happening — declined to take it.
Leibzon's Conclusion ends where the manuscript really ended, in 1979: "In response to China's aggression against socialist Vietnam, most of the Communist Parties at once took a clear-cut stand by condemning the aggressor." He offers it as proof that "communist unity has deep roots". In the December of the year this translation carries, martial law was declared in Poland, and it was that — the one event the book had been revised past and declined to mention — which brought Berlinguer to declare the propulsive force of October exhausted, the rupture the Italian party called the strappo. Within a decade the movement whose cohesion this book set out to explain had ceased to exist. The publisher's own blurb promises that "The author does not shun sharp political issues." He was a better historian than that sentence suggests and a more careful one than his 1977 collaboration allowed. He shunned exactly three: the tanks in Prague, the troops in Kabul, and the shipyard in Gdańsk.