Volume Two runs from the Paris Commune to the eve of the first Russian revolution — the Russian title on the reverse of the English title page reads Rabochee dvizhenie v period perekhoda k imperializmu (1871–1904), the workers' movement in the period of the transition to imperialism. It is 273,000 words, and it is not a collection: it is a continuous, jointly written history, with a basic team of eighteen named authors, a further twenty-odd who supplied data, and an editorial board of six under an Editor-in-Chief, V. V. Zagladin. Its subject is the Commune and its suppression, the last years of the First International, the Anti-Socialist Law, the founding of the Second International, the Bernstein debate, the Millerand affair, the growth of trade unions and cooperatives and women's and youth organisations, the first proletariats of Latin America, Asia and Africa, and — for something like a third of its length — Russia, Iskra, and the Second Congress of the RSDLP.
The date needs settling first, because the spine is four years later than the text. Volume One carries "© Издательство «Мысль», 1976 / English translation © Progress Publishers 1980". Volume Three carries Mysl 1978 and Progress 1983; Volume Four, Mysl 1980 and Progress 1984; Volume Five, Mysl 1981 and Progress 1985. The corresponding line in Volume Two did not survive the scan — where the Russian copyright should stand, the extracted text carries only the printing codes. But the internal evidence closes the gap. The latest secondary work cited anywhere in the book is dated Moscow, 1976. The two latest events named are the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU, which met in February 1976, and the Conference of the Communist and Workers' Parties of Europe held in Berlin in June 1976, whose proceedings are cited in their 1976 printing. Nothing later appears. Given the series' consistent four-to-five-year translation lag, this is a Russian text of about 1977 reaching English readers in 1981. Read it as a document of the years immediately after Helsinki and Berlin, not of the year Solidarity was banned.
The other change from Volume One is a matter of who signs. Volume One opened with a signed thirty-page introduction by Academician B. N. Ponomarev — a Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, as the Soviet press styled him and as Intercontinental Press confirmed at the time — and a companion introduction in this series argued — rightly, and the argument holds — that Ponomarev's pages were the most revealing thing in the book, because they stated the commission out loud: the seven volumes exist, he wrote, for "interpreting the past in the interest of the present and future". Volume Two still carries "Introduction by Academician B. N. Ponomarev" on its title page and still lists him as Chairman of the general editorial committee. But his introduction is not reprinted here. The introduction to Volume Two is unsigned, and it is a different kind of document: not a statement of purpose but a thirty-page compression of Lenin's theory of the party, of hegemony, and of the two tendencies in the working-class movement, written in the collective voice of the editorial board. The rank has withdrawn behind the institution. What it left behind is a vocabulary.
The vocabulary is one word. Opportunism and its cognates occur 199 times in Volume Two, 7.3 times per 10,000 words. To see what that means, set it against the rest of the Progress catalogue: across 195 titles the rate is 1.55 per 10,000, and 76 of those books — well over a third — never use the word at all. Volume Two uses it more than nine books in ten.
It is worth correcting one thing before going further, because the correction is itself a finding. This series is often described as the catalogue's densest user of the term, and that is true of the series but not of this volume. Volume One, which ends in 1870, sits at 1.44 per 10,000 — the corpus average, indistinguishable from a book that is not doing this at all. Volume Two is at 7.28. Volume Three (1983), covering 1905 to 1914, is at 12.91 — the highest figure in the whole catalogue, with The World Communist Movement (1973) just behind it at 12.80. Volumes Four, Five and Six then fall away to 3.26, 1.88 and 0.66.
So the curve is not flat and it is not an author's tic. The word switches on at exactly the point where the Second International arrives and Bolshevism is being founded, peaks in the volume covering 1905–14, and dies away afterwards. It is a period instrument. And the period it belongs to is the one in which the Soviet account of the world workers' movement has to explain why the largest, most successful socialist parties in history were, in the end, on the wrong side — and why a small Russian faction was on the right one.
Watch how the word behaves. Of the 199 occurrences, nineteen are explicitly right-flavoured ("right opportunism", "right-wing opportunists"). Six are left-flavoured. All six of the left-flavoured uses put "left" inside scare quotes; not one of the right-flavoured uses is qualified at all. The introduction states the asymmetry as doctrine:
But right opportunism is not alone. "Left" opportunism grows as a sort of reaction to it, as a manifestation of petty-bourgeois pressures on the working-class movement. Outwardly the antipode of right opportunism, it is actually no more than the reverse side of one and the same coin.
This is the move that a comparable Progress title, A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (1984), makes explicit when it defines Trotskyism as a petty-bourgeois opportunist current that "shrouds its opportunism with radical leftist phraseology". The scare quotes do the same work in miniature. They pre-empt the objection that the accused sound more revolutionary than the accuser: whatever a "left" opportunist says, the quotation marks have already ruled that he does not mean it. Right opportunism gets no such treatment, because right opportunism is at least what it says it is.
It is worth knowing where that particular pairing came from, because it is not the private usage of a team of historians. In December 1971, five or six years before this volume was written, the chairman of its general editorial committee published a twenty-one-page article in Kommunist subtitled "Trotskyism — Weapon of Anti-Communism", and closed it with a list of tasks for "our theoretical and propagandist cadres". The first of them, as Intercontinental Press rendered it a month later, was "To profoundly lay bare the anti-Leninist essence of Trotskyism, its ideological and political kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions". Volume Two applies that formula to the Second International of 1898. It is the same formula, and the quotation marks around "left" have survived the journey.
The other 174 uses are bare — the noun stands alone, applied to a person, a tendency or a resolution, and nothing follows. That is the real work the word does. It is not an analytical category that has to earn its application; it is a classification that removes the need for one. Nowhere in 273,000 words is the reader shown an argument for why a particular position is opportunist, as against merely mistaken.
And yet — this matters, and the volume should get credit for it — the book does sometimes concede. The test case is Jean Jaurès, whose "Opportunist propositions, which were close to Vollmar's views" the book condemns in one chapter, and whose 1902 Tours programme it mocks as satisfying "the revolutionaries by the fact that it spoke frequently of revolution, and the moderates by the fact that it was permeated with Bernsteinism". On colonialism, several hundred pages later, the same book writes that Jaurès, "by unmasking the brutalities of colonialism and its close connection with militarism, and demanding the unification of proletarians and all the working people in the fight against war ... became an enemy of the imperialists, instilling fear in them. In his practical activity against colonialism and militarism Jaurès sided with the revolutionary Social-Democrats—the followers of Marx and Engels." That is a real concession, made against the grain of the volume's own vocabulary, and it is the sort of thing that a book written purely to classify would not contain. There are others: Kautsky is criticised for his 1904 Amsterdam resolution and simultaneously credited with the Anti-Critique against Bernstein; the SPD leadership's failure is located precisely, and honestly, in the fact that at Hanover "neither Bebel nor any other leader of the party raised the question of expelling Bernstein and his supporters from the SDPG".
That last sentence is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual complaint. The charge Volume Two lays against the German party is not that it was too harsh with its minorities. It is that it was not harsh enough — that it tolerated "a contest of views", in Kautsky's phrase, which the book quotes in order to condemn. A history written in Moscow in 1977 about a party that failed to expel its dissidents in 1899 is a history with a subject it cannot name.
The name Trotsky appears twice in Volume Two, and forms of "Trotskyist" and "Trotskyism" four times more. That is six occurrences in 273,000 words, in a volume that reaches 1904. For comparison, Volume One — which stops nine years before Trotsky was born — manages three. Volume Three, covering 1905–14, jumps to twenty-nine, with Stalin's name appearing seven times. Volume Two is the trough, and it is the trough at exactly the point where a serious history would have to say something: at the Second Congress of 1903 Trotsky was a delegate, an Iskra supporter, and one of the men who split with Lenin over the first paragraph of the rules.
One of the two mentions is a footnote reference to a Lenin title. The other is this:
The drive of the overt opportunists to exclude any mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat from the programme was supported by Leon Trotsky, one of a group of vacillating Iskrists which shortly afterwards was to form the nucleus of a new opportunist trend in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, Menshevism. While posing as a champion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he asserted that it would be possible only when the proletariat constituted the "majority" of the nation. This attitude betrayed a lack of understanding of the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a general disregard for the role of the many millions of peasants as an ally of the working class in revolutionary struggle.
Read the first two sentences against each other. In the first, Trotsky supports excluding any mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the second, he is a champion of it who attaches a condition. Both cannot be true, and the second is the one the book's own source — the published minutes of the Congress, cited to page 136 — will bear. The first sentence is not a report; it is an amalgam, of the kind this series has now been caught making three times over Brest-Litovsk, where Trotsky is regularly given Bukharin's position. The mechanism is the same: place the man in the company you want him judged by, then let the reader supply the rest. What is being paid for here is the word "supported", which does all the work and rests on nothing.
There is a document that settles it, and it was written in 1903 by one of the delegates. Trotsky's Report of the Siberian Delegation is his account of the Congress to the organisation that sent him, published the same year. On the programme debate he records that there was, in effect, no fight — and he names the critics. They are the same two men the Soviet volume names, without him among them:
The congress did indeed give us a program, or more precisely, it adopted without basic corrections the draft program presented by the editorial board of Iskra and Zarya. But although this part of the work was without any doubt positive, there is nothing to be said about it, because in reality the congress only affirmed that in this field "all was going well". The critical voices of Comrades Martinov and Akimov and a few delegates of the Bund were raised in isolation.
He is explicit that he was inside the Iskra organisation, that the Iskra bloc had voted as one on the programme, and that the split came afterwards and over something else entirely: the differences "blew apart the Iskra-ists compact majority which had unanimously repulsed the federalist pretensions of the Bund, designated Iskra as the organ of the Party and adopted the program presented by the editorial boards of Iskra and Zarya", and "The first point of the statutes — the definition of the concept of 'party member' — served as the basis of the first open clash." That is also what Volume Two's own narrative says happened, a few pages later, when it comes to describe the paragraph-1 debate and the division of the Iskra-ists into "hard" and "soft". The book contains its own refutation; it simply does not set the two paragraphs beside each other.
As for the placing of Trotsky at the "nucleus" of Menshevism, he answered that charge in 1927, in his letter to the Bureau of Party History — printed ten years later as part of The Stalin School of Falsification — and the answer concedes more than the accusation requires:
I was of that "minority" (menshinstvo) of the Second Congress (1903) from which Menshevism subsequently developed. I remained politically and organizationally associated with this minority only until the autumn of 1904 ... In 1904, that is, twenty-three years ago, I broke politically and organizationally with Menshevism. I never called myself or considered myself a Menshevik.
The first sentence is an admission, and a fuller one than most polemicists make about themselves. The last is the part Volume Two's formula is built to make unsayable.
The rest of the passage is more interesting than the smear, because it is the whole quarrel of the next thirty years compressed into two clauses and then sealed. The charge is disregard for the peasantry — which is the standing Soviet charge against the theory of permanent revolution. But the phrase "permanent revolution" does not occur in this volume. Neither does "socialism in one country". Trotsky's position is never stated, so it cannot be examined; only the verdict on it survives. And the volume's own unsigned introduction, some six hundred pages earlier, has already written a sentence that a reader allowed to compare the two would find hard to unsee: that Lenin concluded "the proletariat could and should now be the leader not only in the socialist but also in any people's, including bourgeois-democratic, revolution", and that "proletarian leadership of the democratic revolution was the foundation and guarantee of the possibility for its development into a socialist revolution."
Lenin and Trotsky did genuinely differ in these years — about the class character of the provisional revolutionary power, about whether it would be a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry or a proletarian dictatorship leaning on the peasantry. That is a real argument, and it was argued in public. It is not the argument this book reports. This book reports that one of the two men had a "general disregard" for the peasantry, and then stops.
Every introduction in this series has to be careful about absences. A history that closes in 1904 cannot be blamed for not mentioning the Moscow Trials, the POUM, the Popular Front or Kronstadt, and the nil returns on all of those tell us nothing at all. Stalin's name occurring zero times in a book about the nineteenth century is chronology, not evidence.
There is one absence in Volume Two that is not chronology, and it is decisive, because it falls squarely inside the volume's own dates.
Rosa Luxemburg is one of this book's heroes. She appears some forty times, always favourably where the book's politics allow: the first to answer Bernstein, the author of Social Reform or Revolution, the mover of the anti-militarist resolution at Paris in 1900, the one leader of the German party who demanded mass action against the intervention in China. Her disagreement with Lenin over the right of nations to self-determination is stated openly and argued against, at length and by name — which is exactly what a scholarly book should do.
Volume Two also devotes two full chapters to the founding of the Bolshevik party. It narrates the paragraph-1 dispute with Martov clause by clause. It quotes Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back nine times, including the "state of siege in the Party" passage in full. And in 1904, in Neue Zeit, Rosa Luxemburg published a reply to One Step Forward, Two Steps Back — an argument that Lenin's organisational conception was an ultra-centralism carried over from the Blanquist conspiratorial tradition, that it mistook the discipline of the factory for the discipline of a class, and that the errors of a genuinely revolutionary movement are worth more than the infallibility of the ablest central committee.
That text is not mentioned. Not refuted, not misrepresented — absent. The word "centralism" and its cognates occur fifty-nine times in the volume; the one contemporaneous critique of Leninist centralism from inside the revolutionary wing of the International, published within the volume's own terminal year by the volume's own most-admired witness, is not among them. This is the shape the falsification actually takes in a book of this quality. It is not that things are said which are untrue. It is that a document is left out, and the reader is never given the chance to know that the argument had two sides before 1917.
A book about 1871–1904 has, on the face of it, no occasion to cite the leaders of the French student revolt of May 1968. Volume Two does. In chapter 11, discussing Lenin's theory of the party, the "ultra-left ideologues" who "contend that 'any organisation and any programme inevitably paralyses' the movement" are footnoted to Sauvageot, Geismar, Cohn-Bendit and Duteuil, La révolte étudiante (Paris, Seuil, 1968). Two footnotes later, Roger Garaudy's L'Alternative (Paris, 1972). In chapter 12, the exponents of "left" opportunism are traced "beginning from G. Sorel and other ideologues of anarcho-syndicalism ... to some 'neo-Marxists' of the Frankfurt school and also Jean Paul Sartre, Paul M. Sweezy, Andrée Gorz, and other spokesmen of petty-bourgeois radicalism", with Sweezy cited to Monthly Review for December 1967. In the same chapter, "Works penned by anarcho-syndicalists and Trotskyists invariably misrepresent the fundamental character of the differences in the international proletarian movement", and "'left'-opportunist, Trotskyist, and similar interpretations of many problems of the working-class movement of this period are often used also by rabid bourgeois anti-communists."
So the enemies list of 1968–76 is imported wholesale into a history of the 1890s, and the same two-front schema — right opportunism and "left" opportunism, twin faces of one coin — is used to sort both centuries. The classification is not a finding about the Second International. It is a template, and the book applies it forwards.
Two of the names deserve a note. Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fischer are introduced together as "present-day spokesmen of revisionism" who "distort the historical facts in order to belittle the significance of the Leninist stage in the development of Marxist theory." What the reader is not told is what these two men had recently done. Fischer, the Austrian party's leading theorist, and Garaudy, for years the French party's official philosopher, were both expelled from their parties around the turn of the 1970s, after publicly opposing the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Czechoslovakia 1968 is not mentioned in this volume. It could not have been, in a book that ends in 1904 — except that the book has already reached forward to 1972 to name the men, and having reached that far, it tells the reader they are revisionists about Lenin's early philosophy, and nothing else.
One further intrusion, of a different kind. Twice in the account of the Second Congress the authors footnote a historical claim to M. A. Suslov's The Second Congress of the RSDLP and Its Worldwide Historic Significance (Moscow, 1973). Once they footnote the assessment of the Congress's significance to a resolution of the CPSU Central Committee dated 4 April 1973. These are chapters otherwise built on the published Congress minutes, on Lenin's Collected Works, on Krupskaya's memoirs and on the archives. In the middle of that apparatus sit a citation to a serving member of the Politburo and a citation to the Central Committee itself, on a question of what happened in Brussels and London in 1903. That is the institutional fingerprint, and it is more revealing than any adjective.
None of the above should be allowed to obscure what this book mostly is, because a reader told that the whole of it is propaganda would be badly misled, and would also miss the best labour history Progress ever exported.
Start with a test that this series set for itself. A companion introduction here examined the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's unsigned preface to The Hague Congress of the First International (Progress, 1976), and found that across nine pages it contrived never to tell the reader that Bakunin was expelled. Volume Two covers The Hague. It says so plainly: the commission of inquiry "confined itself to recommending the expulsion of Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International for their divisive activities. This the congress proceeded to do." More than that — it criticises the Congress for the way it did so, and criticises it against Marx and Engels:
The only resolution of The Hague congress not entirely in keeping with the line mapped out by Marx and Engels concerned the results of the inquiry into the activities of the Alliance.
Marx and Engels had wanted the Alliance expelled as a body; the commission had not had time to read the documents, was "misled by the testimony of the Bakuninists", reached no conclusion about the secret Alliance, and expelled two men instead. A book that will criticise a decision Marx pressed for, on the ground that the procedure was inadequate, is not a book that has given up on history. The same seven-volume project that produced the Ponomarev introduction produced this, and it is more candid than the preface the same Institute wrote for its own documentary edition of the Hague Congress — a 690-page volume of minutes and resolutions whose introduction never names Bakunin in his own right.
The chapter on the labour aristocracy is the strongest single stretch in the volume, and it is quantitative social history of a high order. It works from Engels's 1892 preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England ("They form an aristocracy among the working class"), from the British official series British Labour Statistics: Historical Abstract, 1886–1968, from Philip Foner, from Tom Mann's Memoirs, and from a genuinely contested literature: F. A. Rothstein's estimate that the labour aristocracy was between a sixth and a quarter of the British proletariat is set beside "the progressive British sociologist E. J. Hobsbawm", who "estimates that in that period the labour aristocracy in Britain comprised a maximum of 10–15 per cent of the working class", and a Soviet estimate for Germany beside both. Wage dispersion is traced across four countries and four decades, with the turning points given. Tom Mann's account of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers branch that voted five to seventy-odd against the eight-hour day — nobody opposed in principle, but "the time was not ripe" — is exactly the right kind of evidence, and it is used without sneering.
The chapter on the colonial and dependent countries is the volume's genuine scholarly contribution, and it is the reason to keep this book on a shelf. It is built on Spanish- and Portuguese-language sources that were not otherwise reaching English readers in 1981 — Rubens Iscaro's Historia del movimiento sindical, Hernán Ramírez Necochea on Chile, Nelson Werneck Sodré on Brazil, Leonardo Paso on Argentina, Cuban and Colombian documentary collections — and it gives the first Latin American, Asian and African proletariats a serious quantitative account: the size of the Latin American urban working class by the late 1890s, the Argentine occupational census of 1869 and the 1895 class breakdown, the Brazilian immigration figures either side of abolition in 1888.
The section on southern Africa is unsparing and precise. The 1894 tax designed to drive peasants to the mines; African employment in gold mining rising from 14,000 in 1890 to 98,000 by the Anglo-Boer War; the masters-and-servants law of 1880 in the Transvaal and its Natal and Free State counterparts; the permit law of 1899 with its ten-pound fine or twenty lashes; the compounds, the tuberculosis, the death rates; the 1891 Natal wage of £2 2s for an African against £5 13s for a white worker; the 60,000 Chinese indentured miners sanctioned in 1904. And then, having established all that, the book does not flatter the white labour movement it is describing. Of the 1884 Kimberley strike against body searches, which cost seven workers' lives and won the abolition of searches for whites: "The strikers were satisfied by this, although the humiliating procedure was preserved for the Africans." That sentence would not be out of place in any modern history of South African labour.
The chapter on Bernstein is a competent, close account of the Bernstein-Debatte worked from Die Neue Zeit, from Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus itself, and from the Stuttgart and Hanover congress protocols, with the votes given (216 to 21 at Hanover) and the international spread of revisionism traced country by country. And in the short section on the women's movement the book makes an admission that costs it something: "At the close of the century there was thus no women's socialist movement in any country, even in countries with hundreds of thousands of women factory workers."
Set that beside the treatment of E. P. Thompson, and you can see the two halves of this book pulling apart. Volume One cited The Making of the English Working Class around a dozen times and called Thompson "the progressive British historian". In Volume Two he appears exactly once. His book, its title misprinted as The Making of the British Working Class, sits in a footnote to a list of bourgeois historians who regard the working-class movement "as a democratic movement alien to socialist ideas". Hobsbawm is still "progressive". Thompson has been reclassified. Nothing in the intervening five years changed what Thompson wrote; what changed was which chapter of the series he turned up in.
On the Paris Commune, the counterpart text is Trotsky's "Lessons of the Paris Commune", written in February 1921 and reprinted in The New International in March 1935, when that magazine was still the American Trotskyists' — it changed hands at the 1940 split and should not be cited as theirs after March 1940. Its judgement is the opposite of this book's, and harder: "The Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4 ... The Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders to whom it would have been closely bound by previous struggles." Volume Two attributes the Commune's defeat chiefly to the immaturity of the movement and the absence of a Marxist party in the abstract; Trotsky puts the failure in a date and an opportunity forgone.
On the Second International, Max Shachtman's "The Second International in the War", in The New International for August 1934 — again from the magazine's Trotskyist years, though Shachtman took it with him in 1940 — locates the collapse where the Soviet volume cannot, in what the parties had become rather than in a list of named opportunists: "The great betrayal of socialism in 1914 by the Second International consisted in trampling in trench-mud the Basel anti-war resolution and the whole of revolutionary socialist tradition. The main parties of the International had become so closely interwoven with the fate and interests of the capitalist fatherland that the declaration of 1912 was little more than a heroic echo of a revolutionary past." For Bernstein specifically, Joseph Hansen reviewed Peter Gay's The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism — the very book Volume Two cites as evidence of social-reformist historiography — in Fourth International vol. XV no. 4 (whole no. 129), Fall 1954, and gave a fairer account of Bernstein's motive than either: he "had the unenviable distinction of being the first after the death of Engels to break from the great founders of scientific socialism", facing "new, unanticipated facts that seemed to vitiate the prognoses of the masters".
On the labour aristocracy, where this book is at its best, the anti-Stalinist left has no settled line to offer, and that is worth saying rather than hiding. Tony Cliff's "The Economic Roots of Reformism", written in 1957 and reprinted in The New International in Winter 1958 — by then Max Shachtman's journal, and Cliff belonged to a third current again — quotes Lenin at length and then rejects the theory outright, on the ground that the spread and solidity of reformism across the whole working class over the following half century cannot be explained by the buying-off of what Lenin had called "an infinitesimal minority of the proletariat and the working masses". Volume Two's chapter assumes the answer Cliff denies. A reader who wants the question rather than the answer should have both.
For the specific charge levelled at Trotsky here — the leap over stages, the disregard for the peasantry — the answer was published in 1930 as The Permanent Revolution, where the position is stated before it is defended, rather than left, as here, to be inferred from the verdict. And the reader who wants the 1904 objection Volume Two omits should go to Rosa Luxemburg's Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, commonly reprinted under a title that was not hers, Leninism or Marxism? — and then, for the argument taken seriously from the other side, to Joseph Hansen's review of Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky in the International Socialist Review, Winter 1960. Hansen quotes Trotsky's own 1904 formulation — "the party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee" — and then argues against it, holding that it "turned out to be no more than what it was, an exaggerated statement in a factional dispute" that needed conditions Trotsky did not then supply. A reader may side with Deutscher or with Hansen. The point is that the exchange happened in the open, in a journal of the tradition being condemned, and that nothing of the kind occurs in this book.
There is one further finding, and it is not to the Fourth International's credit. The phrase "Institute of the International Working-Class Movement" returns nothing across all 763 issues of Intercontinental Press, 1968 to August 1986; nothing in the International Socialist Review, in Fourth International, in The New International, in International Viewpoint or in Inprecor. Neither does the name of the Institute's director, nor the subtitle Problems of History and Theory. Boris Ponomarev, by contrast, appears in Intercontinental Press more than twenty times between 1969 and 1981 — always as the Central Committee secretary, never as the chairman of this history. The Kommunist article quoted above, no. 18 for 1971, approved for printing on 16 December that year, was reviewed by George Saunders in Intercontinental Press on 24 January 1972, within weeks, observing that "the Kremlin leaders have made a major move to upgrade the status of the anti-Trotskyist campaign. One of the top inner circle has been assigned to put his name to a rewritten and updated version of the old themes," and that the substance of the historical section was "to reiterate over and over: 'Trotskyism is the opposite of Leninism. It is not the continuation of it. It is the opposite, the opposite.'" The polemic was answered in a fortnight. The seven-volume Academy history over which the same man presided went unremarked for fifteen years. The polemics were easier to fight, and they were the part of the operation that mattered least.