Part One of this history stopped on 3 March 1917, so an introduction to it could only measure what de-Stalinisation had done to the pre-revolutionary record. This is the volume where the account falls due. Its Foreword states the span: "a survey of the history of the peoples of the Soviet Union over a period covering almost a quarter of a century—from the triumph of the October Socialist Revolution to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War." October, Brest-Litovsk, the Civil War, Kronstadt, Lenin's last writings, the Left Opposition, collectivisation, the famine years, 1937, the Nazi–Soviet Pact — every site of the classic falsification is inside this book's covers.
Like Part One it is signed. The Foreword assigns the chapters: Chapter I to A. P. Nenarokov; Chapter II to Yu. I. Korablev and A. P. Shurygin; Chapters III and IV to D. A. Kovalenko, heading the group; Chapter V, on culture, to V. A. Kumanev; "The section on the agricultural development during the 1930s was written by N. A. Ivnitsky"; the foreign-policy sections to A. O. Chubaryan and I. S. Kremer. The front matter reads "First printing 1977 Second printing 1981", the English made "from revised Russian edition", copyright 1977. What Progress sold in 1981 was a mid-Brezhnev text produced a year before the sixtieth anniversary of October — the settled, post-Khrushchev version, no longer arguing about Stalin and not intending to reopen the question. Ivnitsky was and remained the outstanding Soviet archival historian of dekulakisation, and it shows. Worth saying at the start, because the case against this book is not that it is stupid.
Turn to Chapter One and follow the Revolutionary Military Committee. The book introduces it: "the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet formed a Revolutionary Military Committee (RMC)". The RMC then appoints commissars to the whole Petrograd garrison and to the key points of the capital, readies the Red Guard, orders sailors up from Helsingfors, Kronstadt and Revel, broadcasts the proclamation deposing the Provisional Government, and hands power to the Second Congress of Soviets. It is the acting subject of the insurrection for a dozen pages. It has no chairman. Nobody chairs the Petrograd Soviet either. Search the volume for the word and you will find the chairman of the Lesnovsk District Duma (Kalinin), the chairman of the Archangel Soviet, the chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, the chairman of GOELRO. The chair of the body that made the revolution is a blank.
What fills the blank is the Short Course's device, retained but demoted. "At a closed session, the Central Committee created a Revolutionary Military Center for the direction of the uprising; it consisted of A. S. Bubnov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, J. V. Stalin, Ya. M. Sverdlov and M. S. Uritsky. The Central Committee resolution specified that the Center was to enter the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet." That second sentence is the concession: in 1938 the five-man Centre had been "the leading core" of the RMC with "practical direction of the whole uprising", Stalin at its head. Here it is a subordinate body joining an existing one, and Stalin is fourth alphabetically in a list of five. The leadership is then given to Lenin, who "took into his own hands immediate leadership of the uprising that was beginning" on the night of 24 October — true, and also not an answer to the question of who ran the RMC for the preceding ten days.
Trotsky appears in Chapter One exactly once, in the list of the first Council of People's Commissars: "L. D. Trotsky, foreign affairs". He is not accused of anything. He is simply not there for the events preceding the cabinet he is listed in.
This is not a new discovery, and that is the point. When the post-Stalin History of the CPSU appeared, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain — went through it 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. He quoted that history's sentence on the Centre — that it "should enter the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Soviet" — and observed that "the organ that was 'to lead' simply entered the already existing organism and did not modify either its work or its leading tasks". The formula Mandel dissected is reproduced here, in substance and nearly in wording, fifteen years later. Mandel also reprinted Stalin's own article in Pravda of 6 November 1917, crediting the practical organisation of the insurrection to the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky, and the RMC's effective work "above all and essentially to Comrade Trotsky". The 1977 authors were not short of evidence; they were short of permission.
Everything else about Trotsky is negotiable. From 1918 he is present, named, and given his offices. He "headed the Soviet delegation" at Brest-Litovsk and disobeyed Lenin's instructions: "Trotsky thus broke off negotiations, doing great damage to the Soviet Republic and putting it in mortal danger." At the Eighth Congress it is "The Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, L. Trotsky, who distorted the principles of Party leadership in the army". In the trade union controversy he advances "the harmful slogan of 'screw tightening'". These are political charges, several arguable on the merits and one — the January 1918 formula at Brest — a real misjudgement Trotsky himself never denied. There is no espionage, no wrecking, no Gestapo. The criminal law has been withdrawn here as it was in Part One.
The rule that survives is narrower and more precise: he may hold any office except the one he held in October. The book will call him Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. It will not call him chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. (Part One's sharpest finding — Trotsky absent from the Name Index while two tsarist police chiefs were in it — cannot be tested here; this volume's index was not captured in our scan.)
The largest single gain over 1938 is in Chapter Three. The Short Course suppressed Lenin's last dictations entirely. Here the "Letter to the Congress" is named, discussed over several pages, and quoted — including the sentence that mattered: "That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead". The book then adds, in its own voice, "History was to show how perspicacious Lenin had been." A Soviet general history telling its readers that Lenin was right to try to remove Stalin is not nothing; readers who came to it in 1977 were not being handed the 1938 book with the names changed.
But look at what is quoted and what is not. The book gives Lenin's criticisms of Trotsky ("excessive self-assurance"), his doubts about Zinoviev and Kamenev, his criticisms of Stalin. It gives none of the praise: not that Trotsky was "perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee", not that Bukharin was the party's most valuable theoretician. And it attributes to Lenin something Lenin did not write: "Lenin warned the Party of the possibility that Trotsky might manifest Menshevik relapses." Mandel had caught precisely this operation in the 1959 History, which he found quoted the Testament "in a singularly mutilated and falsified way", suppressing the praise, keeping the criticisms, and inventing a warning against "Trotsky's very dangerous relapses into Menshevism" of which, he wrote, "there is not one word in the entire Testament." The 1977 book reproduces the invention. And the Thirteenth Congress's decision to keep Stalin is explained by "Stalin's irreconcilable struggle against Trotskyism" — the Testament used as evidence for the man it asked the party to remove.
Kronstadt gets four sentences. "An example of the new tactic was the Kronstadt mutiny, which began on February 28, 1921", the mutineers "actively supported by the Russian and foreign bourgeoisie, Mensheviks and SRs", crushed on 18 March "by Red Army units under the command of M. N. Tukhachevsky." The Chronological Outline calls it the "Kronstadt White mutiny". Nobody in the book notices that the mutineers were sailors, or that Chapter One had credited an "8000-man detachment of sailors from Helsingfors, Kronstadt and Revel" with helping to take Petrograd forty months earlier. The Petropavlovsk resolution, with its demand for new soviet elections by secret ballot, is not mentioned; the casualties are not given. The 1921 crisis is otherwise treated seriously — peasant revolt in Tambov and Siberia named, the industrial workforce shown collapsing from 2,555,000 in 1913 to 1.4 million — which makes the handling of the one revolt raised in the soviets' own name the more pointed still.
The Left Opposition is never called that. It is the "Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc", the "new opposition", "Menshevism in its peculiarly Trotskyist formulation". Its arguments appear only as the book's summary of them, and its defeat is arithmetic: "only half percent of the members of the Party supported its line." What the book does do, and the Short Course did not, is print the roll of the expelled: at the Fifteenth Congress, seventy-five oppositionists "including Kamenev, Pyatakov, Radek, Rakovsky, Safarov, Smilga, I. Smirnov and Lashevich". Christian Rakovsky, named there without comment, was a Bulgarian-Romanian socialist who had headed the Soviet government of Ukraine and served as ambassador in London and Paris; he capitulated in 1934, was a defendant in the last Moscow trial, and was shot in 1941. Not one of those endings is anywhere in this book.
Ivnitsky's section on the village is the most substantial thing in the volume and deserves to be read on its own terms. It gives the machinery of dekulakisation in detail — the three categories, the 3-to-5 per cent ceiling, the taxation designed so that "taxes absorbed not only the entire annual income but also a part of the farm's property" — and does not pretend the process was gentle: "the principal means of liquidating the kulaks (well-to-do peasants) as a class were forcible expropriation and dekulakization." Peasants, it concedes, were "forced to enter collective farms under the threat of being 'dispossessed as kulaks'". And it gives numbers: "In two years, around 600 thousand kulak farms were expropriated and more than 240 thousand kulak families deported." That is real work, and it is conservative — archival series published after 1990 put the deportations to "special settlements" in 1930–31 alone at over 380,000 families, some 1.8 million people, with heavy mortality in transit and on arrival. The frame remains: "The confiscation of kulak property... was a just measure", the Central Committee "exercised a maximum of caution", the deportees were being "reeducated".
Then comes the silence. The famine of 1932–33 does not appear. The volume's nearest approach is a subordinate clause about a fall in collective farm membership, caused by "difficulties of the reorganization period, difficulties caused in 1931 and 1932 by draught and crop failure in a number of areas of the RSFSR and the Ukraine, by the intrigues of the defeated but not yet cowed class enemy, the kulaks, and so on." The book that has just told you how many families were deported and what the tax schedules were will not tell you that millions starved in the same fields two years later. The historiography is genuinely divided on the numbers and sharply divided on intent — excess deaths across the USSR are usually placed between about five and seven million, concentrated in Ukraine, the Kuban and Kazakhstan, and the argument over whether the Ukrainian catastrophe is properly called a genocide is not settled. That there was a famine is not in dispute anywhere.
The Terror occupies one paragraph, preceded by a justification: "given the desperate attacks on Soviet society by the imperialist states, it was necessary temporarily to impose some restrictions on democracy, these restrictions being removed as the Soviet state grew stronger". Then: "It was in these historically specific circumstances that the cult of Stalin's personality developed." Stalin "led the struggle against Trotskyites, Right opportunists, bourgeois nationalists"; "as time passed all the country's achievements were attributed to him"; he "came to believe in his own infallibility, began to abuse the Party's trust, to violate Leninist principles and norms of Party life and to tolerate illegality." And the verdict: "The cult of personality inflicted no little damage to the building of socialism. But it could not — and did not — alter the genuinely popular character of the Soviet order."
That is the whole of it. There are no Moscow Trials — the words do not occur. There is no Yezhov, no Yagoda, no NKVD, no Vyshinsky, no arrest, no execution, no camp, no number. Where the Short Course had at least reported the shootings, in the form of a boast, this volume has abolished the event and kept an adjectival trace of it in "illegality". Two pages earlier the same chapter narrates the elections of December 1937 in the Short Course's own register: of 94 million eligible, "91 million, or 96.8 percent, went to the polls", 98 per cent for the bloc, "Such unanimity among the masses was historically unprecedented."
The proof of what has been done is in the book's own lists. Chapter Two names the commanders the revolution produced — Blyukher, Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Yakir — and the political workers Bubnov, Gamarnik, Kosior. Chapter Five names those who built Soviet military science: "Marshals of the Soviet Union M. N. Tukhachevsky, A. I. Yegorov, K. Ye. Voroshilov, B. M. Shaposhnikov and V. K. Blyukher, I. P. Uborevich, N. G. Kuznetsov, Ya. I. Alksnis". Of those men, Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Blyukher, Uborevich, Yakir, Alksnis, Bubnov and Kosior were all shot between 1937 and 1939; Gamarnik killed himself as the arrests began. They are here, praised, restored to the record — that restoration was the substance of de-Stalinisation and it was real. They simply stop appearing, and the book never says why. "Strengthening the Country's Defenses" runs through aircraft plants, KV and T-34 output and mobilisation stocks, concedes candidly that "the technical modernization of the army and navy had not been completed by the summer of 1941", and does not mention that the army had lost most of its senior command four years earlier. Part One's finding was that de-Stalinisation dropped the accusation and kept the erasure of the name. Part Two inverts it: the names come back and the deaths go out.
The foreign-policy chapters, by Chubaryan and Kremer, are the most professional writing in the book and the most tendentious. The account of the collapse of the Anglo-French negotiations in August 1939 is detailed, documented from published British instructions, and substantially fair: the Western delegations were junior, the British unauthorised to sign, Poland's refusal of transit never pressed. The conclusion follows — "the Soviet Union, threatened with isolation, was compelled to accept the German proposal. On August 23, 1939, a Soviet-German non-aggression pact was signed." Of the secret protocol dividing Poland, the Baltic and Bessarabia into spheres there is nothing, as there could not be: the USSR denied its existence until 1989. The Baltic annexations of 1940 are a spontaneous rising — crowds in Riga, Tallinn, Kaunas and Vilnius, and "All three parliaments unanimously proclaimed Soviet power and called for entry into the USSR." On Finland the book states a plain untruth: "On November 30, 1939, the government of Finland officially declared war on the Soviet Union." The Red Army crossed the Finnish frontier that morning.
The reply was published while it was happening, and from inside the tradition rather than outside it. Trotsky's "Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events", written 25 April 1940 and printed in Fourth International, vol. I no. 2, June 1940, argues both halves at once: that the USSR remained a workers' state to be defended against imperialism, and that "Stalin's assault upon Finland was not of course solely an act in defense of the USSR", that Stalin invaded eastern Poland "with Hitler's permission", and that the war showed that "within gunshot of Leningrad, the cradle of the October revolution, the present regime of the USSR is incapable of exercising an attractive force." It is not a comfortable document, and it was written against comrades who were leaving over these events. It is the opposite of this book's method: it states the strategic case for the Soviet position and refuses to launder the acts.
Take the numbers. The output series, the plan data, the regional figures — Uzbek and Tajik industrial growth, the Kazakh workforce rising from 30,000 to 158,000 between 1929 and 1940 — come from the statistical apparatus and are broadly what a modern economic historian works with, allowing for the known inflation of the early plan indices. Kumanev's chapter on culture is the best-argued part of the book, and its central material is not in dispute: the literacy campaign was one of the great social achievements of the century, and the baseline it started from is given without euphemism — illiteracy at 99.5 per cent among Tajiks, 99.4 among Kirghiz, 98.4 among Uzbeks, and the 1906 projection that universal male literacy was 180 years away. Chapter One draws on participant memoirs — Yakovleva on the Central Committee session of 10 October, Podvoisky on the Winter Palace — and cites John Reed by name. The 1921 famine, unlike the second, is described in full, with the relief committee, the international appeal, Nansen and the American aid. And in the science section M. N. Pokrovsky is called "The prominent Marxist historian" whose work founded Soviet historiography — Pokrovsky having been posthumously denounced in 1936 and his school destroyed. That restoration is genuine, and it is done quietly, without announcing that anything had ever been otherwise. Which is this book in one gesture: the correction made, the correction unacknowledged.
For the rest, the documents are in print and always were. Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (English edition 1937) assembles the 1917 Central Committee minutes against exactly the version of October reproduced here; The Revolution Betrayed (1936) supplies the account of the bureaucracy that explains why a book published in 1977 still could not name the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; the Dewey Commission's Not Guilty (1938) demolished the trial evidence this volume no longer even mentions. Read alongside Mandel's "Thirty Questions", the continuity is the finding: two waves of de-Stalinisation, fifteen years apart, corrected the same passages in the same partial way and stopped at the same line. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the USSR quashed the verdicts of the Moscow trials and the party restored the membership of the men it had shot — seven years after this printing.