A book called The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today is making a promise in its title, and the first thing to establish is whether it keeps it. The Russian title page bound into this translation reads Актуальные проблемы внешней политики СССР — the topical, the current, the pressing problems. Everything the volume claims for itself rests on being up to date.
It is not, quite, and the gap is measurable.
Work through the datable events and the endnotes and the text stops moving in the spring of 1980. The last hard reference is to the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty countries, "which met in session in Warsaw in May 1980", cited to Pravda of 16 May 1980. A steel converter is commissioned at Esfahan in April 1980. China is said to have broken off the normalisation talks "early in 1980". Nothing in the book's substance is later than that. Then, laid over the top, there is a thin second layer: six references to the 26th CPSU Congress of February–March 1981, and one endnote to Brezhnev's Central Committee Report as published by Novosti in 1981. That is the whole of the updating.
You can tell the two layers apart by their texture. The 25th Congress of 1976 is mentioned fourteen times and its positions are argued; the 24th of 1971 eight times. The 26th gets six mentions and every one of them is empty. It "dealt in detail with international politics". It "is of outstanding international significance". It "has put forward a series of new important proposals and initiatives" — which are never named. The conclusion reports that Soviet policy "has been reaffirmed by the resolutions of the 26th CPSU Congress on international problems and by its new initiatives and proposals which have been met with interest and approval by the progressives throughout the world." A reader who wants to know what those initiatives were will not learn it here. The Congress has been welded to a finished manuscript.
Which matters, because of what fell into the gap. Between May 1980 and the Congress: the Gdańsk agreements of 31 August 1980 and the birth of Solidarność; the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war in September; the American presidential election of November. Poland occurs five times in this book, and every occurrence is a list — Poland as a founder member of Comecon, Poland as a signatory of the 1970 treaty with the Federal Republic, Poland among the states whose western border was secured. Solidarity occurs twelve times and every occurrence is the abstract noun, the solidarity of the socialist countries with the peoples of Asia and Africa. Gdańsk: nil. Jaruzelski: nil. Martial law: nil. And Reagan: nil, in a book on Soviet foreign policy published in the year Ronald Reagan took office. Carter is named four times and is still, in these pages, the current President.
So this is a late-Brezhnev text of 1980 in a 1981 jacket, with a Congress pasted on. That is a milder version of the disease than this series usually finds — a year, not a decade — but for a book whose entire claim is currency, a year was the whole distance between the world it describes and the world its English reader was living in.
The catalogue calls Bykov, Razmerov and Tomashevsky editors. The book does not read like an edited collection, and this is worth stating because it is the sort of thing a reader assumes. There are no contributor bylines. There are no chapter attributions. There is no preface, no foreword, no acknowledgements, no list of participants, and no statement of who wrote what. The Russian title page names the three men and nothing else. Nowhere in fifty-three thousand words does the text say where its authors worked, and I am not going to assert an institutional affiliation I cannot source from the volume itself.
What that means for the "specific question" — does the collection permit internal disagreement? — is that the question dissolves. There is a single voice from the first page to the last, and the seams that would let you see three hands at work have been planed flat. That is itself the finding, and it is not a neutral one. A book of this kind, on this subject, in 1980, was not a place where three scholars set out competing readings. It is a consensus document, and the consensus was not theirs to set.
There is a companion volume in this series that lets you watch the narrowing happen. D. Tomashevsky — the third name on this title page — is the sole author of Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations, published by Progress in 1974. Set the two side by side and count. In the 1974 book, ninety-two thousand words, the phrase "balance of power" occurs 129 times, "class struggle" 49 times, "proletarian internationalism" 17 times, and "detente" only 13. In the 1981 book, "detente" occurs 152 times, "balance of power" four times, "class struggle" thirteen. One man, seven years, and the analytical vocabulary has been replaced by a diplomatic one. The 1974 volume was trying to think about international relations. The 1981 volume is briefing for a negotiation.
Section 3 of this series' house practice is to say plainly where a Progress book is good, and chapter II of this one, "The Problem of Preventing a Nuclear World War", is genuinely good. Not good for a Soviet book. Good.
Its central judgement is stated without hedging: "International security cannot rest on the balance of terror." It then explains why, in terms that would not embarrass a Western arms-control specialist of the same date. Strategic balance is dynamic, not static; the two sides' arsenals differ structurally, so their modernisation cycles cannot be symmetrical; and the balancing itself is corrosive. When one side breaks the equilibrium and the other restores it, the authors write, "The equilibrium is thus restored, albeit at the cost of greater material expenditure and with a lesser degree of mutual security." That is a precise statement of the arms-race trap, and it is exactly right.
The chapter is also right about timing, which is the part policy-makers habitually get wrong: "Military technology outstrips the process of restraining the arms race." "It is easier to restrain this race in its early stages. The loss of good opportunities markedly complicates the task at later stages." The worked example is MIRV, and it is honest history. Before SALT began, the book says, "there was a situation in which it was really possible to mutually ban the development of MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles). Yet the American side chose to go ahead with its programme of deploying MIRV missiles, which raised the arms race to a higher level and greatly hampered the talks on subsequent agreements to limit strategic offensive arms." The contrast drawn with the ABM Treaty — a system limited early, before deployment, and therefore limited successfully — is the correct lesson and remains the standard one.
The analysis of "action—counter-action" is better still, because it does not stop at the mechanical version. The authors note that each side plans against the worst contingency in the remote future, that development cycles are long, that "play-safe" counter-measures are "quite understandable", and that domestic and short-range political objectives intrude. Then, in five words that could stand as the chapter's epigraph: "Engendered by politics, arms themselves engender politics."
And the conclusion is not fatalistic. "Scientific and technological progress in the military field is by no means an irresistible force. In the long run it can be controlled politically." Given political will, the book insists, "there is no type of weapon which cannot be effectively limited and physically reduced on a mutual and equitable basis." Anyone who read that in 1981 and dismissed it as propaganda was reading badly. It is the argument that produced the INF Treaty six years later, and the missiles it names were duly destroyed.
The catalogue of Soviet arms-control proposals in the same chapter is also, so far as it goes, real: no-first-use of nuclear and conventional weapons on a mutual basis; guarantees to non-nuclear states; nuclear-free zones; a comprehensive test ban with a moratorium on peaceful nuclear explosions; a chemical weapons convention; the unilateral withdrawal of "up to 20,000 Soviet troops, a thousand tanks" from the GDR announced in October 1979. These were made. Some were serious.
Which brings us to the falsification, and it sits inside the best chapter in the book.
Discussing the NATO double-track decision of December 1979, the authors reject the Western justification: "The Soviet Union is modernising its medium-range missiles which have been in service for decades. This natural modernisation was caused by, besides routine military-technological needs, the updating of the U.S. forward-based nuclear missiles stationed in Europe, and also of the British and French nuclear missiles." Then the specific claim: "in the last decade the number of medium-range nuclear-arms carriers in the European part of the Soviet Union has not been increased by a single missile or a single aircraft. On the contrary, the number of medium-range missile launchers and the yield of their nuclear charges have even been reduced."
The string "SS-20" does not occur in this book. Neither does the RSD-10 Pioner, which is what the Soviet Union called it.
Look at the shape of the claim. It counts carriers and launchers and it measures yield. On those three metrics it is defensible and possibly true. What it does not count is warheads, and the SS-20 carried three independently targetable ones where the SS-4 and SS-5 it replaced carried a single warhead each. Nor does it mention that the new missile was solid-fuelled rather than liquid-fuelled, road-mobile rather than fixed-site, far more accurate, and reloadable — which is to say that a replacement programme leaving the launcher count flat roughly tripled the deliverable warheads and transformed their survivability. The reduction in individual yield, offered here as evidence of restraint, is a straightforward consequence of splitting one large warhead into three smaller accurate ones. The sentence is not a lie in the ordinary sense. It is a true statement selected so that the reader cannot reach the fact.
And the cost of the omission is borne by the book's own case. The authors want to argue that Pershing II and the ground-launched cruise missile are a qualitative change and not a modernisation. That argument is available, and it is strong: the Pershing II's flight time to Moscow was a matter of minutes, which is a different thing from anything then deployed. But you cannot make it while refusing to name the weapon the other side says it is responding to. The chapter that so carefully explains "action—counter-action" declines to apply it at the one point where the first action was Soviet.
The same missile was being argued about in the Trotskyist press at exactly this date, and argued about better — precisely because naming it was permitted. Contrast that with the reasoning offered here and the difference is not one of politics but of what the writer is allowed to put on the page.
Now the book's real structure. Chapter III sets out "The Soviet Conception of Peaceful Coexistence" and quotes the CPSU Programme at length on what it means:
"Peaceful coexistence" the CPSU Programme says, "implies renunciation of war as a means of settling international disputes, and their solution by negotiation; equality, mutual understanding and trust between countries; consideration for each other's interests; non-interference in internal affairs; recognition of the right of every people to solve all the problems of their country by themselves; strict respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; promotion of economic and cultural co-operation on the basis of complete equality and mutual benefit."
The authors then gloss the third of these clauses themselves: "The concept of the peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems is based on the recognition of this difference, on the recognition of the right of every people to organise their life as they see fit, without any outside interference. Guided by this principle, the Soviet Union is against any 'export' of revolution."
Before following that where it leads, notice whose authority is being claimed. The book states that "The Soviet Union's approach to relations between the two opposing social systems and its work towards detente are based on Lenin's conception of the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems." The phrase "peaceful coexistence" occurs ninety-four times in these fifty-three thousand words. It does not occur once inside a quotation from Lenin. Every attribution is made in the authors' own voice; the passage above quotes the CPSU Programme, a document of 1961. The only quoted use of the idea anywhere near 1918 is Bukharin's, at the Seventh Party Congress, and he is using it to say there can be no such thing — "there could be no peaceful co-habitation between us, between the Soviet Republic and international capital". The doctrine's Leninist pedigree is asserted throughout and demonstrated nowhere.
That is not this volume's private habit. Tomashevsky's own Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations (Progress, 1974) does the same thing at twice the length: ninety-two thousand words in which no Lenin quotation contains the phrase, the bridge supplied in the author's voice, and the earliest attested use of the actual words honestly credited elsewhere in that book to Chicherin in June 1920. The same man, seven years apart, in a book of theory and a book of application, arrives at the same silence. It is the load-bearing citation of the whole doctrine and it does not exist.
The Brest-Litovsk passage that opens this volume shows the technique working on the other side of the ledger. Bukharin is quoted; then Trotsky is quoted holding that "deals with the imperialists are inadmissible for the revolutionary class"; then the two are fused — "These concepts promulgated by the 'Left Communists' and Trotsky virtually excluded any foreign policy action on the part of the socialist state." But Trotsky's position at Brest was not the Left Communists'. Theirs was revolutionary war. His was the third option, "neither war nor peace": refuse to sign, refuse to fight, declare the war over unilaterally. It was a serious misjudgement and Lenin said so at the time, but it was not the policy the sentence attributes to him, and lumping the two erases the disagreement that made the episode worth arguing about. This is the third volume in this series caught making the identical amalgam. Tomashevsky performs it in the 1974 book. Georgi Arbatov, in The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations (Progress, 1973), writes that fighting "a 'revolutionary war' against the bourgeoisie of other countries" was "the line which the 'Left' Communists and the Trotskyites wanted the communist movement to adopt." Three books, one publisher, one manoeuvre. It has stopped being an author's error and become a house convention — and it is a revealing one, because the amalgam is needed. If Trotsky held a distinct third position, then the argument of 1918 was a real argument among Bolsheviks about how a workers' state conducts foreign policy, which is exactly the argument these books exist to foreclose.
Some seventy pages later, in the same volume:
"The anti-Soviet campaign in the West reached its climax in connection with the events in Afghanistan. In response to the Afghan government's request, the Soviet Union, in accordance with the Soviet-Afghan Treaty signed earlier, introduced into Afghanistan a limited contingent of troops to repel outside aggression."
The book does not experience this as a contradiction, and the reason is structural rather than careless. Read the definition again and notice its scope: peaceful coexistence governs relations between the two systems. It is a doctrine for dealing with capitalist states. Sovereignty appears in it in one direction only — the authors immediately add that the USSR "resolutely opposes all attempts by the imperialist powers to interfere in the domestic affairs of the socialist countries". Relations inside the socialist community are governed by something else entirely, and chapter V says what: co-ordination.
That chapter is candid in a way its authors probably did not intend. The socialist countries' unity of action, they write, is "based on the natural laws governing the development of world socialism". The mechanism "has no rigidly centralised forms" and is based, they say, entirely on "the full independence of each socialist country" — and then, two paragraphs later, "The Warsaw Treaty Organisation is the main co-ordinating centre" for their foreign policy, with the Political Consultative Committee resolving "all major problems concerning their policy and security", supplemented by the annual Crimean meetings of party leaders. Gromyko is quoted with satisfaction: "We are not ashamed to refer to the foreign policy of the socialist states as a policy conducted on the basis of concord. We are proud of it because its strongest point is that on all major issues it is elaborated and effected jointly." And the frank sentence: "The ability of socialism to act in the international arena as an integral and coherent community, rather than a conglomerate of countries, constitutes its major advantage."
What is missing from that chapter is any account of what happened when a member declined to be integral and coherent. The word Czechoslovakia appears five times in this book — as a signatory of a 1935 pact with the USSR, as a signatory of the 1973 treaty with the Federal Republic, as a founder of Comecon, as a founder of the Warsaw Treaty, and as a state whose borders were confirmed. The year 1968 appears exactly once in the entire volume: in an endnote, as the publication date of an American book about Vietnam. The year 1956 appears exactly once: in an endnote, as the publication date of the proceedings of the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of China. Hungary is named twice, both times in a membership list. The phrase "Brezhnev Doctrine" does not occur, and neither does the thing it names.
This is a book about the co-ordination of foreign policy within the socialist community, written by the state that had twice enforced that co-ordination with tanks, which mentions neither occasion. Nor, we should add, does it mention Khrushchev — whose name appears nowhere, although the 20th Congress is credited by name with the thesis that world war is no longer fatally inevitable, which is the doctrinal foundation of the entire volume. The conclusion is kept; the man who announced it, and the other thing he announced in 1956, are gone.
The anti-Stalinist left answered these arguments as they were being made, and — this is worth saying, because the series is not in the business of retrospective courage — it did not answer with one voice.
On Afghanistan the Fourth International split three ways, in public, in print. Intercontinental Press–Inprecor of 3 March 1980 carried the United Secretariat's majority declaration together with two rival texts, each headed "[The following resolution was supported by a minority of the United Secretariat.]" One minority came close to the Soviet position by an entirely different route, holding that a victory for the Kabul government backed by Soviet troops "would be a blow to imperialism and Afghan reaction". The other refused. It began from the same premise as the first — "While revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the Soviet Union against imperialism, they are not at all obliged to defend every action undertaken by the Soviet bureaucracy" — and then said what this book cannot: "Without a doubt, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is being carried out in gross violation of the right of peoples to self-determination. It is, in fact, well known that the Soviet troops themselves overthrew Amin in order to replace him by Karmal, who they brought from exile with them." It ended with the demand "that the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan immediately", and it made the argument by quoting Lenin's "Communism cannot be imposed by force" — the same maxim this volume invokes, in its own chapter II, to prove that the Soviet Union does not export revolution.
That is the sharpest thing you can put beside this book: not a hostile source, but a document written in January 1980, from the left, holding the Soviet state to a sentence of Lenin's that the Soviet state was simultaneously printing.
On Poland the reply is more direct still, because for once the two sides were printed facing each other. The first issue of the International Marxist Review, in the spring of 1982, ran extracts from an article by F. Kouznetsov, First Secretary of the Union of Moscow Writers, published in Literatournia Gazeta, alongside a reply by Ernest Mandel. Kouznetsov's idiom is the idiom of this book. "Today in Poland it is difficult to directly attack the idea of socialism but one can disfigure it, misrepresent it and through that even destroy it. That is the particular tactic of the counter-revolution in Poland today." He explains the ten million members of Solidarność as the work of "anarcho-syndicalist ideas and conceptions" recuperated by outside agitators, and traces them, with some care, to Jacek Kuroń, who "idolised Trotsky and his theory of 'permament revolution'."
Notice the asymmetry that opens up here. The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today names Trotsky twice, both times in 1918, both times as a "Left Communist" whose objection to the Brest-Litovsk peace "virtually excluded any foreign policy action on the part of the socialist state". He is a dead sectarian of the first year. Meanwhile the Soviet literary press was explaining the largest independent workers' movement in the history of the bloc as a Trotskyist infection. Both propositions cannot be true, and the state was publishing both in the same eighteen months.
Mandel's reply is the counter-analysis this volume's economic chapters make no room for. Against Kouznetsov's claim that the union was damaging socialism, he asks who ran up the twenty-six billion dollars of debt to the capitalist banks — "The bureaucracy or Solidarnosc?" — and who opened negotiations for Poland's entry into the International Monetary Fund. He puts the question of power plainly: "The real issue is to know who will govern the workers state?" And he records the situation on the ground: "Today a situation of de-facto dual power exists in Poland. The workers can practically impose what they want at the level of the factories and in the towns. But they do not have state power." He was not an uncritical partisan of the union — "It is true that there is a strong syndicalist (or anarcho-syndicalist) influence in Solidarnosc. We regret that. We criticise it on the political level." — which is precisely why the analysis holds up.
This was not hindsight. An International Executive Committee resolution dated 28 September 1981, in Intercontinental Press–Inprecor of the same date, had already concluded that the union's regional coordination "contains within itself the embryo of a counter power of the workers in face of the bureaucracy" and that "the political antibureaucratic revolution has in fact already begun in Poland" — eleven weeks before the coup. When the coup came, the Bureau of the United Secretariat's statement of 17 December 1981, printed in Intercontinental Press–Inprecor of 18 January 1982, named it: "Eighteen months after the beginning of the antibureaucratic political revolution, Jaruzelski, his stooges, and the Kremlin have unleashed the counterrevolution by the military coup d'état of December 13, 1981" — in order to preserve the bureaucracy's monopoly of political power, "which is the basis of its exorbitant material privileges."
The same current was equally unwilling to be recruited by Washington. A Fourth International resolution in Intercontinental Press–Inprecor of early 1982 states the position on the Euromissiles without softening either edge: "The Fourth International has always counterposed the revolutionary solution to the Utopian illusions of 'peaceful coexistence' or 'victory' in a nuclear world war", and adds that the Communist parties inside the Western peace movement "are much more discreet on the question of unilateralism or on the necessity to disarm imperialism in order to eliminate the danger of war, given their general orientation of 'peaceful coexistence.'" On China the same tradition refused the choice this book insists on. Its September 1981 resolution held that "The Chinese bureaucracy turned against Vietnam for similar reasons to those which led the Soviet bureaucracy to oppose Peking in the 1950s and 1960s", and that Peking used against Hanoi "the same methods against Vietnam as those that the Kremlin used against China". Chapter VI of this volume, sixty pages against "Peking's hegemonistic policy course", cannot entertain that symmetry for a sentence.
Behind all of it stands the argument Trotsky had made in 1936, in chapter 8 of The Revolution Betrayed, and which this book confirms in its own words without noticing. "Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals." Trotsky's specific charge was not that the Soviet state had no right to diplomacy: "no serious revolutionary statesman would deny the right of the Soviet state to seek supplementary supports for its inviolability in temporary agreements with this or that imperialism. It is only necessary clearly and openly to show the masses the place of these partial and tactical agreements in the general system of historic forces." The charge was that the movement abroad had been converted into an instrument of that diplomacy — that the Communist International had become "a completely submissive apparatus in the service of Soviet foreign policy, ready at any time for any zigzag whatever", one that "deceives the workers with slogans like 'collective security' and 'disarmament', and thus becomes in reality a political agent of the imperialists among the working classes."
Read chapter III of this book against that. Here is its own formulation, and it is remarkable that it was printed:
"In their socio-historical content, relations between the socialist and capitalist countries are part of the worldwide class struggle. But this struggle is not waged by classes—it is waged by states through their foreign policy, by means of employing specific methods in a specific international setting."
The class struggle, conducted by states. Trotsky's indictment, offered as doctrine.
The book knows the objection, too, and answers it — which is the one moment it acknowledges that a left-wing critique of its position exists. It sets itself against "the Leftist attacks on the policy of peaceful coexistence", and states the charge accurately before dismissing it: "By asserting that peaceful coexistence is tantamount to 'aiding capitalism' and 'freezing the socio-political status quo', the 'Left' distortionists of Marxism-Leninism forget that any revolution is primarily a result of inner developments and ignore the fact that economic competition between socialism and capitalism is their chief battlefield today." Set that last clause beside the volume's publication date. Economic competition as the chief battlefield, asserted in a book finished in 1980, by a state whose growth had been flattening for a decade and whose closest ally was about to default. And the charge about freezing the status quo was answered not by argument but by events: the status quo the doctrine protected was, within eighteen months, being enforced in Poland under martial law. Everything else follows from it: why the Polish working class is not a subject of this book but Polish membership of Comecon is; why the peace movement — the phrase occurs twice in fifty-three thousand words — is an auxiliary rather than an actor; why "national liberation" appears thirty-eight times and is always something the Soviet Union supports rather than something that might make demands of it.
Read this as the last full statement of the détente position before détente was pronounced dead — a book that still believed, in the spring of 1980, that the framework of the 1970s could be repaired. Its chapter on nuclear war is honest work by people who understood the technology and had thought seriously about how arms races end, and its diagnosis was vindicated: the weapons it discussed were negotiated away, in 1987, on roughly the terms it proposed. That is not nothing.
Read it also for the exact shape of what its authors were not permitted to write. They could analyse the American military-industrial complex but not name the SS-20. They could quote the CPSU Programme on the right of every people to solve its own problems and, seventy pages on, describe the 40th Army entering Afghanistan as fraternal assistance. They could devote a chapter to the co-ordination of foreign policy within the socialist community without once mentioning Budapest or Prague. And they could write a book called Today which stopped, in every particular that mattered, before the August in which the Polish working class made the whole architecture obsolete.
Three men's names are on the title page and there is no way to tell which of them wrote what. That anonymity is not a bibliographical inconvenience. It is the book's most accurate self-description.