The first thing to notice about this book is that it has authors, and that they are listed. The introduction ends with a paragraph assigning every chapter to a named scholar: Chapter 1 to D. P. Kallistov, Chapters 2 and 3 to I. I. Smirnov with A. I. Kopanev and N. A. Kazakova, Chapter 4 to N. Y. Nosov, Chapter 5 to A. G. Mankov and I. P. Shaskolsky, Chapters 6 and 7 to M. P. Vyatkin — "supplemented after his death by A. G. Mankov" — Chapter 8 to S. S. Volk, Chapter 9 to Sh. M. Levin, Chapters 10 and 11 to R. Sh. Ganelin. The sections on culture in Chapters 2 to 5 are credited to D. S. Likhachov. The book, we are told, "was prepared by the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of History, and its first edition appeared in Russian in 1963".
Set that beside the title page of the volume this series has already reprinted, the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course of 1938, which named no author and instead announced that it had been "EDITED BY A COMMISSION OF THE C.C. OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.)" and "AUTHORIZED" by the same body. Between those two title pages lies the whole of what de-Stalinisation did to Soviet history writing, and also the whole of what it did not do. A history is no longer a decision of a governing body. It is the work of academics, most of them Leningrad specialists, several of them serious in ways that survive translation. What they were permitted to write about, and what they were still required to leave out, is the subject of this introduction.
Fix the scope before making any claim. This is Part One of three, and it ends on 3 March 1917. The introduction says so: "This book aims to provide a brief outline of the history of the USSR from the earliest times right up to 1917. The history of the October Revolution, and the formation and development of the multinational Soviet socialist state are the theme of the next book." Chapter Eleven closes with the abdication of the Grand Duke Mikhail and the words "A new period had begun in the history of the peoples of Russia." The Chronological Outline stops at "1917, March 2 — Abdication of Nicholas II. Provisional Government formed."
So the great sites of Stalinist falsification are not here, and cannot be found absent from a book that never promised them. There is no October insurrection in this volume, no Military Revolutionary Committee, no Brest-Litovsk, no Left Opposition, no collectivisation, no famine of 1932–33, no Moscow Trials, no Terror, no Pact. Lenin's Testament does not appear because 1922 does not appear. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tukhachevsky, Yezhov and Beria are all absent, and none of those absences is worth a word: a history ending in March 1917 owes the reader nothing about any of them. The trap in counting this way is worth showing once. Kirov appears in the book — but as the Putilov Works, "now the Kirov Works", and the man is not there at all; famine appears five times and every one is a famine of the sixteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth centuries; the single hit for collectivism is a Narodnik (Populist) programme of the 1870s. A count is only evidence when the author had the fact and a reason to use it. Judgement on all of that belongs to Part Two, and a reader who wants to know what the Brezhnev-era official narrative did with the 1930s must look there.
Fix the date, too, more carefully than the spine invites. The front matter reads: "First printing 1965 Second revised printing 1977 Third printing 1981", with the copyright given as Progress Publishers 1977. The Russian original appeared in 1963 — that is, at the height of the second de-Stalinisation, between the Twenty-Second Congress of 1961 and Khrushchev's fall. What Progress sold in 1981 was a Khrushchev-era textbook, revised once in the 1970s and reprinted unchanged under Brezhnev.
How light that revision was can be measured. The introduction claims the new edition "has been revised so as to incorporate the latest results of Soviet historical research", and across its hundred and fifty-seven thousand words the only dates later than 1963 anywhere in the text are two. Both are archaeological, and both are 1969: a burial site found near the River Sungir with the remains of two boys and worked mammoth ivory, and the Scythian barrow of Gaimanova Mogila, "excavated in 1969 in the Zaporozhye Region". Somebody went back into Chapter One and added two digs. Nobody, so far as the text will show, went back into Chapters Nine to Eleven. That is the more interesting fact about the revision: not that it declined to put Stalin back, but that between 1963 and the second printing the party history seems not to have been reopened at all.
The three parts are worth setting side by side, because they are not one book. Part Two also carries 1981 on its spine — "First printing 1977 Second printing 1981" — and is a text of 1977. Part Three carries 1982, "First printing 1977 Second revised and enlarged edition 1982", and is genuinely a book of the early 1980s, carrying a section on the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February–March 1981. So a reader who buys the set in a London bookshop in 1981 and reads it through is crossing, without being told, from a Khrushchev-era manuscript to a mid-Brezhnev one and then to a late-Brezhnev one. The uniform jackets are the only thing uniform about them, and Part One is by eighteen years the oldest object in the box.
On the terrain the two books share — the party history of 1898 to 1917, told here across Chapters Nine, Ten and Eleven — the changes are large and easy to state.
Stalin appears in this book once. He is the fifth of six names in a list of Bolsheviks working in the provinces during the Stolypin reaction: "in Baku—Meshadi Azizbekov, P. Japaridze, G. Orjonikidze, S. Spandaryan, J. Stalin and S. Shahumyan." The Name Index gives him a single page reference; Sverdlov gets three and Kalinin two. In the Short Course Stalin's pre-1917 career was the spine of the narrative; here he is one Baku organiser among six, and the Prague Conference of January 1912, which the Short Course had presented as the moment of his elevation to the Central Committee, is described in this book without mentioning him at all.
The criminal charges are gone. Trotsky is named three times, and in none of them is he a spy, a wrecker, an agent of a foreign power or a saboteur of the insurrection. He heads the Menshevik campaign after 1903 — "The Menshevik campaign against the Party was headed by Martov, Trotsky and Axelrod" — he leads "his group of Centrists, the supporters of unprincipled reconciliation who declared themselves outside of all factions", and he forms the August bloc of 1912, which "tried to prevent the consolidation of the working class under the Bolshevik banner". These are political accusations. Two of them are substantially true as descriptions of Trotsky's conciliationism in the years of reaction, a position he himself later called a mistake, and Lenin's polemics against it are in print and can be read. Nothing here would require a court.
That is not a small thing, and it should be said plainly rather than sneered at. A generation of readers who had been taught that the organiser of the Red Army was a Gestapo agent were now handed a book in which he was merely wrong. Whole categories of lie had been withdrawn.
And in one place the new history does something the old one refused to do: it names office-holders it dislikes. Of the Petrograd Soviet of February 1917 the book states that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries "appointed the Menshevik N. Chkheidze chairman, and the Socialist-Revolutionary A. Kerensky and the Menshevik M. Skobelev deputy chairmen." The Short Course had narrated twenty pages of insurrection without once saying who chaired the Petrograd Soviet. This book says. It even concedes, of that Soviet, that its "influence was far more real and effective than that of the Duma Provisional Committee".
Now the other half, and it is the half that matters, because the method that survives is the method that did the work.
Turn to the revolution of 1905. Soviets of Workers' Deputies, the book says, arose across Russia in the autumn and "became embryonic forms of popular state power". The Moscow Soviet is described at length and its Bolshevik leadership named. Of the St Petersburg Soviet, the first and by far the most important of them, the entire treatment is one sentence: "Matters were different in St. Petersburg, where the Soviet was in the hands of the Mensheviks."
Its chairman is not named. Nobody in it is named. The body that Lenin would later call the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government, that issued the Financial Manifesto, that was arrested en masse in December 1905 and tried in 1906, is disposed of by a statement about factional control. The St Petersburg Soviet's first chairman was the lawyer Georgy Khrustalev-Nosar; when he was arrested on 26 November 1905, the Soviet elected as chairman its deputy chairman, Trotsky, then twenty-six, who conducted its final sessions and its defence in court. That is the technique of the Short Course exactly: describe the office, narrate its acts, never name the man. De-Stalinisation dropped the charge of treason and kept the vanishing.
The Name Index makes this explicit in a way the authors presumably did not intend. Trotsky is named three times in the body of the book and does not appear in the index at all. The sequence runs Trepov, D. P. — Trepov, F. F. — Trezzini, D. — Tropinin, V. A. — Trubetskoi. Two chiefs of the tsarist police are indexed; the man the same index would have had to call chairman of the Petrograd Soviet is not.
That could still be an accident of prominence, so test it on the hardest case. The book's first mention of Trotsky is the sentence "The Menshevik campaign against the Party was headed by Martov, Trotsky and Axelrod." Three names, one clause, one accusation, one page. The index carries "Martov, Y. O.—296, 297, 312" and "Axelrod, P. B.—260, 297". It does not carry Trotsky. The same holds for the three men the book does name at the head of the February Soviet: "Chkheidze, N. S.—355", "Kerensky, A. F.—355", "Skobelev, M. I.—355" are all there. Whoever compiled that index was applying a rule about which the historians had not been consulted — and it was a rule about one name, not about importance, since the rule spared everyone standing next to him in the sentence.
The same conservatism governs the shape of the story. Of the Prague Conference of January 1912 the book gives the expulsion straight — "The Conference purged the party of opportunists by declaring that the liquidators had placed themselves outside the party and had no right to use its name" — and then closes with a sentence that undoes it: "The Conference ended with the formal unification of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in a single Party." Prague is the moment the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a separate party. A reader is told in consecutive sentences that the Mensheviks' organised wing was put out of the party and that the two factions were united in it, and is left to reconcile them unaided. Menshevism throughout is explained rather than argued with; it expresses "the inconsistency, wavering and half-heartedness typical of the petty bourgeoisie", and Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, "degenerated to the Menshevik position". The word degenerated is doing the work that treason used to do. The theory of permanent revolution — the subject of a large part of the polemic against Trotsky in the 1930s, and of Trotsky's own reading of 1905 — is not discussed, refuted or mentioned. February 1917 produces not dual power but a formula: "Two dictatorships were set up simultaneously in the country—the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." The reader is left with Lenin's 1905 slogan intact on the eve of the April Theses that abandoned it, and no indication that anything was about to be abandoned.
It is worth being exact about the vocabulary, because the obvious complaint is the wrong one. This is not a shrill book. The word opportunism and its family occur six times in a hundred and fifty-seven thousand words, well below the average for Progress's list, and the accusation is usually attached to something a person is said to have done: the opportunists "tried to curtail the rights of the Central Committee as the leading body of the Party"; the Mensheviks at the Fourth Congress "foisted their opportunist point of view on the delegates" and "took the line of winding up the revolution". Those are claims about conduct, and a reader who thinks them false can go and look. The line about the petty bourgeoisie quoted above is of a different kind — it assigns an essence, and nothing could count against it. Both habits are in the book, and the honest description is that the first predominates.
What the book cannot do is turn the category round. In all six uses the Party is the agent putting opportunism down and never the thing accused of it; at Prague it is the Conference that "purged the party of opportunists". That is the test worth applying, and it is not a test about frequency or tone — our own tradition uses the word at much the same rate. The question is whether the charge is one the speaker could ever face. Here it is definitionally not, and that is a fact about the form of the argument rather than its volume.
The finding, then, is narrower than the slogan but harder: de-Stalinisation withdrew the criminal charges and left the structural silences standing. What was removed was the accusation. What was kept was the absence.
A reader told that all of this is worthless will be defenceless against it, and in this case would also be wrong, because most of the book is not about the party at all.
Roughly eight of the eleven chapters cover the period before 1861, and they are the work of specialists writing inside their competence. Likhachov, who wrote the culture sections of Chapters Two to Five, was the outstanding Russian medievalist of the century, a man arrested as a student in 1928 and imprisoned in the Solovki camp; his pages on the chronicles, on Novgorod, on the icon and the seventeenth-century schism are the real thing compressed. Ganelin, who wrote the last two chapters, spent his career on the machinery of the late tsarist state and went on publishing after 1991. The economic and social material throughout is drawn from Soviet archival scholarship of a high standard: the population and urban growth figures for the sixteenth century, the accounting of Stolypin's land settlement (of some nine and a half million communal households, about two and a half million took title and roughly a million of those sold out), the strike statistics for 1912 to 1914, the emigration figures for 1900 to 1910.
Two passages deserve particular attention because of what they were permitted to say. The account of the oprichnina in Chapter Four is a straightforward description of a state terror: "Secret police, torture, mass executions, the destruction of estates and the plunder of the property of boyars in disgrace, and sometimes punitive expeditions against whole towns and even districts followed one after another." Under Stalin, Ivan IV had been an object of official rehabilitation, and Eisenstein was censured in 1946 for portraying the oprichniki as something like a Ku Klux Klan. Here the terror is named, the drowning of Novgorod described, and only a residue of the old apologia survives, in the sentence that follows: "One can only be amazed that such 'two-faced' behaviour was combined in Ivan the Terrible with great foresightedness and ability in governing the state."
The second is the treatment of the empire. Russia was "a prison of the peoples", and the book writes without evasion of "the colonial policy of tsarism", of the Central Asian revolt of 1916, of the police-organised anti-Jewish pogroms of 1905, of the Beylis frame-up, of the Lena goldfields massacre with its 270 dead and the Interior Minister's reply in the Duma: "That is how it was, and that's how it will be in the future!" This is the internationalist inheritance, not the Great Russian one, and after the late-Stalin years — when annexation had been recast as voluntary union and Shamil denounced in 1950 as an agent of British and Turkish imperialism — its restoration was a genuine gain. The residue is visible in the Shamil passage even so: the imam now leads an "anti-colonial movement", but his defeat is still attributed to his "reliance on help from the British". The verdict was softened; the frame was kept.
The answer to this kind of book was worked out on the first version of it. When the post-Stalin History of the CPSU appeared to replace the Short Course, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain — went through it question by question in "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union", published in two installments in Fourth International, the English-language quarterly of the International Secretariat, nos. 10 and 11. His conclusion about the reform is the one this volume confirms from a different direction: the new history "repeats on this subject — while attenuating them — the gross falsifications of the Short Course". On Lenin's Testament, which the Short Course had suppressed entirely, Mandel found that the 1959 History now quoted it, "but in a singularly mutilated and falsified way", printing the criticisms and omitting the praise. Restore the document, keep the use of it. It is the same operation performed here on the St Petersburg Soviet.
The general shape of the operation was described while this book was still new. In the autumn after the Russian first edition appeared, Dick Roberts took apart the rehabilitation of Marshal Tukhachevsky — announced by Khrushchev in two paragraphs of a closing speech to the Twenty-Second Congress — in "Purge and Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union", International Socialist Review vol. 25 no. 4 (Whole No. 169), Fall 1964. Rehabilitation on those terms, he wrote, offered "a striking measure of Moscow's half-hearted attempt, after more than twenty years, to bring the truth of Stalin's purges to light": a procedure that "can resolve thousands of cases in a trifling sentence at a Moscow party meeting" while the record stays shut. He turned then to the historian commissioned to carry the reform abroad — Louis Aragon, whose A History of the USSR from Lenin to Khrushchev was published in New York that same year, and who had been, in Roberts's phrase, "hand-picked by the Khrushchevites" for the task — and finished on a sentence that describes the book in your hands better than it described its own target: "There is not a little 'curious information' that their hand-picked historians must 'fail' to uncover." Roberts was writing about the 1930s, not about a textbook of early Rus. But the mechanism he had identified in 1964 is the one operating in the volume printed the year before: the sentence of acquittal, published; the evidence, not.
For the 1917 that this volume stops just short of, Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (English edition 1937) assembled the Central Committee minutes and the suppressed documents themselves, and his 1905 is the participant's account of the Soviet whose chairman this book declines to name. Readers who want to see how long the silences outlived the accusations should look at the late 1980s, when the rehabilitations resumed: Mandel's assessment of the Soviet moves to reverse the Moscow Trials verdicts appeared in International Viewpoint no. 128 (October 1987), and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International replied to Gorbachev's anniversary speech of 2 November 1987 — which had renewed the political charges against Trotsky while dropping the criminal ones — in "Gorbachev's speech: a new mystification of history", International Viewpoint no. 130 (November 1987). Seventy years after October, and twenty-four years after the first edition of the book you are holding, the argument was still about who was allowed to be named.