This is a schoolbook, and it should be read as one. History of the Middle Ages is not a monograph, not a polemic, and not a work of research addressed to adults; it is the standard Soviet secondary-school textbook on the medieval world, the volume from which Soviet children learned what the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the discovery of America had been about. Progress Publishers issued it in English in 1982, but its life was in the Russian classroom, and the register never lets you forget it. "You will learn how the working people lived at that time and how valiantly they fought for freedom and a better life," the first chapter promises its pupil, and the book keeps the promise in the second person throughout: numbered study questions close every section, a "Request to Readers" asks the child's "opinion of this book, its translation and design," and the back cover records that in 1978 the volume "was awarded the State Prize of the USSR." That last fact fixes its standing exactly. This was not a marginal production but the canonical text, honoured by the state, put into the hands of tens of millions. It is the sequel, the book itself says, to History of the Ancient World — the two together forming the world-history spine of the Soviet school course.
To read it, then, is to watch the Marxist-Leninist account of world history being taught not to cadres or to sympathetic foreigners but to twelve-year-olds, as their ordinary schooling. That is what makes it worth reprinting. The interesting question is not whether a children's textbook is subtle — none is — but what a whole society chose to teach its children as the shape of the human past, and how the master-narrative of historical materialism looked when it was boiled down to a catechism a child could recite in an examination.
Take the date lightly. The spine reads 1982 and that is the year of the English translation, but the text is older: this is the Russian textbook of the Brezhnev decades, in print and reprinted long enough to have won its State Prize in 1978, and nothing in it belongs to the 1980s. A history that stops at the discovery of America has no contemporary events to date it by, so the usual test — what is the latest thing the author knows about? — does not bite here, and it would be idle to hunt for the absence of glasnost in a book about the fifteenth century. What dates the book is not its silences but its architecture, and the architecture is the thing to examine.
The frame is announced on the first page, and it is the frame of Stalin's 1938 codification of historical materialism: history as a fixed succession of socio-economic formations, each society climbing the same staircase in the same order. "From the history of Antiquity, you have learned how people lived under the primitive communal system and the slave-owning system," the pupil is reminded; "throughout the Middle Ages, most peoples lived under the feudal system." Antiquity was the slave formation, which the child studied last year; the Middle Ages are the feudal formation, the obligatory stage between slavery and capitalism; and the whole book is the story of that one stage — "the emergence of feudalism," "its main characteristics," and "the reasons for its decline." Everything is fitted to this scheme. "Under the feudal system, two main classes existed, feudal lords and dependent peasants," and the engine of the period is the antagonism between them: "Heavy feudal oppression resulted in a fierce class struggle between the feudal lords and the peasants." The pupil is not invited to weigh this; he is set to prove it. One study question reads, flatly, "Why is class struggle inevitable under the feudal system?" — the conclusion supplied, the child's task merely to reconstruct the argument for it. The closing review of the whole book is franker still: among its final exercises the pupil must demonstrate that the feudal order was "a higher stage than the" slave-owning system, and explain why it was in turn "forced to give way to" capitalism. The necessity of the sequence is not a finding to be reached but a proposition to be defended in an exam.
What the schema selects for is the history of the labouring majority and its revolts. Where a Western textbook of 1982 would organise the medieval centuries around dynasties, this one organises them around uprisings, and it clearly relishes them. The Jacquerie of 1358 is given a full section, its peasants credited with a clarity the book admires: "the insurgents knew who their enemies were—the feudal lords." Wat Tyler's rising of 1381 gets a chapter to itself, John Ball released from prison to lead beside him, the rebels demanding that the Church's lands be divided among the peasants and that all Englishmen be given equal rights, and the king breaking his word the moment the danger passed. The Hussite wars in Bohemia are read as "a peasant war," longer and better organised than the English and French risings. And the sequence is deliberately worldwide: the same section that treats Europe carries the rebellion of Huang Chao in ninth-century China, a peasant army led by a man "very good with a javelin and a bow," so that the child sees the class struggle as a law of the feudal world and not a local European accident. The German Peasant War of 1525 is the culmination — "the highest stage of the Reformation," the point at which "the people made an attempt to destroy the feudal system." The revolts are heroic, their defeats tragic, their leaders martyrs; the whole emotional charge of the book runs toward them.
This is genuine historical materialism, and made into a school subject it has real explanatory power. A child taught this book comes away understanding that the cathedral and the castle were paid for out of the peasant's harvest, that the three-field system mattered as much as the succession of kings, that religion and law and art all sat on a particular way of producing food and were shaped by it. That is a serious and largely true thing to teach, and it is taught with energy. But the same schema that illuminates also flattens. Because every society must occupy the same rung at the appropriate moment, the book must find "feudal lords" and "dependent peasants" everywhere, whether or not the local society was built that way — and here the strain shows most in the parts of the book that are, by the standards of the genre, its glory.
Before pressing the objection, the credit has to be paid, because it is substantial and it is the reason the book is worth anyone's time. A materialist world history that puts the producing majority at the centre — that asks what the peasant ate and how much of it the lord took, and treats the risings of the poor as the motor of the age rather than as disturbances of the peace — was, as school history, in many ways more honest and more illuminating than the great-man and national-glory history taught to children elsewhere in 1982. It told a French or English child's Soviet counterpart that history is made by the people who work, and that ordinary human beings have fought their exploiters in every age and country. Set against a curriculum of coronations and battles, that is not a small gift, and it is a Marxist one.
The genuine breadth is the second thing to credit. This is a world history, and it means it. The Arab Caliphate gets three full sections — its rise, its structure, and, pointedly, its culture — and the treatment of Islamic learning is warm and unpatronising: Arab scholars "stated that knowledge was man's best asset"; Córdoba's schools drew "students from many European countries"; Avicenna, "the head of all scholars" in the East, wrote medical works that "remained the principal reference books" for European physicians "up to the 17th century"; and Europe is told plainly that it "acquired a great deal of valuable scientific knowledge from the countries of the caliphate." India and China are not appendices but recurring subjects, from the Chinese peasant wars to Cheng Ho's ocean voyages to the Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin's journey to the Deccan. A Western schoolbook of the period that gave the medieval Islamic and Asian worlds this much respectful attention would have been unusual; this was the norm for every Soviet child. The claim sometimes made for these textbooks — that they de-provincialised the past — is, on this evidence, largely fair.
The treatment of the Atlantic slave trade deserves its own line of credit. The book does not give sub-Saharan Africa a history of its own — Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe are absent, and Africa enters mainly as a coast the Portuguese sailed round and a source of captives — but what it does with the slave trade is morally clear in a way many contemporary Western textbooks were not. It calls the traffic "the despicable trade in 'live goods,'" describes the burning of African villages and the horror of the ships' holds for a child's eyes without flinching, and lays the enrichment of the European bourgeoisie squarely on "the suffering and death of millions of people." A twelve-year-old reading this learned that the wealth of the rising West was built on plunder and enslavement. That, too, is a Marxist emphasis, and it is to the book's credit.
The cost of the universal staircase is paid where the world does not fit it, and the book itself keeps showing the seams. The Caliphate is the clearest case. Having described a society in which "nearly all land in the caliphate was considered the property of the caliph," the book must nonetheless deliver the required verdict: "The Arab nobility turned into feudal lords and landowners, and the peasants found themselves dependent on the new masters." A state that is the universal landlord, rent and tax merged, no manorial hierarchy and no serfdom — this is precisely the configuration that Marx himself, writing about the East, set outside European feudalism altogether and called the Asiatic mode of production. The concept had been condemned in Soviet scholarship in the early 1930s and quietly banned; after Stalin's 1938 fixing of the five stages, Soviet historians of Asia had one permitted task, to find slavery and feudalism where Marx had found neither. The companion volume in this series, A History of India, Volume One, shows learned specialists performing exactly that operation on the Indian evidence, itemising the predominance of state-owned land and the absence of serfdom and then writing "feudalism" over the top of the list. Our schoolbook performs the same operation in one sentence, for children, without the specialists' visible unease — the Caliphate is feudal because every society at that stage must be. The child is handed the answer the scholars were forced to reach; he is spared the sight of the evidence pulling the other way.
The teleology is the subtler charge, and it needs stating precisely, because the book is better on this point than its frame would predict. The five-stage schema is teleological by construction: it presents the whole human past as an escalator whose next step, after capitalism, is socialism, and every earlier stage as a rung on the way to that destination. A schema built to end in 1917 tends, in weaker hands, to turn every peasant rising into a rehearsal for the October Revolution. This book, to its real credit, mostly resists the sermon. It stops at the discovery of America and does not preach forward; the words "socialism," "proletariat" and "1917" do not appear in it at all. The revolts are not presented as conscious steps toward a future the peasants could not have imagined; they are presented as the peasants' own struggle for "freedom and a better life," which is truer to the peasants. But the architecture carries the teleology even when the prose does not. The pupil who is drilled to prove that feudalism "was a higher stage" than slavery and was "forced to give way to" capitalism has been taught the escalator as a law, and the escalator has only one terminus. The book does not name it. It does not need to; the child's next textbook will.
Religion is the place where a reader braced for crude Marxism will be most surprised, and the surprise is worth registering fairly. The famous slogan — religion as "the opium of the people" — appears nowhere in the book; the caricature one expects is simply absent. What the book teaches instead is the functional account, and it is closer to the fuller Marx than the slogan is. The medieval Church is presented first as an economic institution: "the church was the biggest landowner and the mainstay of the feudal system," a feudal lord among feudal lords. And its doctrine is read as ideology in the exact, non-mystical sense — as a message pitched to keep the exploited quiet: "Christian morality was called upon to instil humility and patience in the oppressed people and suppress all thought of struggle against the feudal order." That is not the assertion that believers are fools; it is a claim about whose interests a doctrine served, and on the medieval Church as a landowning power it is largely right. The reading descends directly from Engels, whose The Peasant War in Germany taught that medieval heresy was class struggle fought out in religious language — which is why this book can treat the Hussites and Thomas Münzer's followers as revolutionaries rather than as fanatics. Where it flattens is where all such functionalism flattens: every religious idea is cashed out, in the last instance, as a device of class rule, and the enormous something-else that religion also was — consolation, meaning, the "heart of a heartless world" in Marx's own fuller sentence — drops out. But this is the mild version of the fault, and it would be unfair to a schoolbook to pretend it commits the crude one. As the drafted introduction to Tokarev's History of Religion argues at length, the interesting Soviet failure on religion is not vulgarity but a blind spot about coercion; a medieval textbook, describing the Inquisition and the burning of Giordano Bruno with evident sympathy for the victims, does not reach that blind spot at all.
The tradition from which this series is written shares the book's starting point and rejects its rigidity. Marxists do not need persuading that history has a material basis, that modes of production succeed one another, or that the class struggle is its motor; the disagreement is with the escalator — the claim that every people must climb the identical stairs in the identical order, which Stalinism turned from a broad generalisation into a law of nature and stamped into the schoolbooks. The objection is not that the stages are false but that they were made mechanical. Feudalism, slavery, the primitive commune are real and useful categories; the error is the drillmaster's insistence that each society must pass through each in turn, an insistence that forced Soviet historians to write "feudal" over societies Marx had expressly set apart.
George Novack's Understanding History (Pathfinder, 1972) makes the case at exactly the level a reader of this textbook needs: the materialist conception of history is a genuine discovery and a powerful tool, but it is a guide to inquiry, not a timetable that the facts are obliged to keep. The sharpest single instrument against the staircase is Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development, formulated against precisely the unilinear stagism the textbook teaches. Backward societies, Trotsky argued, do not obediently repeat the path of the advanced ones; they fuse archaic and modern forms into something new. "To jump over intermediate stages," he put it in 1932, "is the way of backward countries" — the whole of Russian history his standing refutation of the idea that the stairs must be climbed one at a time. A schoolchild taught uneven and combined development instead of the fixed ladder would understand more, not less, of why the Caliphate and Mughal India and Ming China did not look like the France of Louis XI — and would not have to be told to prove that they secretly did.
None of which cancels the book. It is a school textbook, and it should be judged as one: for what it chose to teach children as the meaning of the past. What it chose was, in its broad outline, a serious and humane thing — that history is made by those who labour, that the wealth of the powerful is drawn from the poor, that the medieval world was the whole world and not merely Christendom, that the enslaved and the exploited fought back in every age. Those are real tools, and Soviet children were given them at an age when children elsewhere were given kings and flags. The book's fault is the fault of its frame: it hands the child the conclusions instead of the evidence, and it forces a various world onto a single staircase. Read it for what it is — the class struggle taught as a school subject to a whole society's children — and it is one of the more revealing documents in this catalogue, precisely because it aimed so low and, within its limits, so often told the truth.