For the first time in this three-volume history, the date on the spine is the date of the text. Part One carried 1981 and was a Khrushchev-era book of 1963. Part Two carried 1981 and was a mid-Brezhnev book of 1977. Part Three says "First printing 1977 / Second revised and enlarged edition 1982", and the enlargement is real: the Foreword records that "The 26th Congress of the CPSU, held on 23 February-3 March 1981 in Moscow, elaborated new tasks in the building of communism", the last chapter carries a section on that Congress, and the Chronological Summary runs into the spring of 1981, closing on a Soyuz launch in May. The book was assembled in the year Brezhnev died.
One apparent anomaly should be disposed of at once, because it looks like evidence of a later printing and is not. Several dates in the 1990s appear in a book printed in 1982. All of them are forward projections, and all of them are the same document: the Twenty-Sixth Congress adopted "Guidelines for the Economic and Social Development of the USSR for 1981–1985 and for the Period Ending in 1990", and the book refers to it three times. The remaining instances are a Soviet–Finnish trade programme running to 1990 and a passage on planning data extending "up to 1990". There is no OCR corruption here and no hidden later edition. This is a 1982 text about a future that did not arrive.
Like its predecessors it is signed, though more loosely: "This variant of the volume was prepared by a group of authors, consisting of professors D. A. Kovalenko (Chief Editor), V. A. Kumanev, G. A. Kumanev, I. M. Volkov, I. S. Kremer, and G. D. Komkov; L. K. Bayeva, Cand. Sc. (Hist.), and researcher N. P. Zimarina." The editorial board is headed by A. M. Samsonov, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and a serious historian of Stalingrad. G. A. Kumanev was a specialist in the wartime economy and evacuation; I. M. Volkov worked on postwar agriculture, including the famine of 1946–47 that this volume does not mention. The commission was legitimation, but the people executing it were not hacks, and the war chapter shows it.
Say the good part first, because the case against the book depends on it.
Chapter One is a hundred and forty pages on the Great Patriotic War and it is, at the level of operations and production, competent military history. The fronts are named and so are their commanders — Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Vatutin, Yeremenko, Konev, Govorov, Meretskov, Chernyakhovsky, killed in East Prussia in February 1945. The economic mobilisation is set out with the numbers that made Soviet war-economy scholarship worth reading: German steel output rising from 22.5 million tons in 1939 to 31.8 million in 1941; the Soviet defence share of the state budget moving from 25.5 per cent in 1939 to 32.6 in 1940 to 43.4 in 1941; 1,200 evacuated enterprises brought back into production by the summer of 1942; the Donbas mines requiring 620 million cubic metres of water to be pumped out before coal could be cut again. The German intention is stated without softening: the invaders meant to "annihilate millions of Soviet people—primarily Communists and Soviet, trade union and Komsomol activists—and reduce the remainder to slavery."
And the human cost is recorded. "Over twenty million Soviet citizens lost their lives during the war. There was hardly a family that had not known the grief of losing someone who was dear to it." Of the occupation: "In the Ukraine alone over 4 million Soviet citizens and prisoners-of-war were slaughtered." A reader who takes nothing else from this book should take that, and should notice that the twenty-million figure was for decades the Soviet state's own understatement — the archival revision of the early 1990s put total Soviet war deaths nearer twenty-seven million.
The book also names, without embarrassment, the thing Western accounts of 1945 often lose: that the Red Army opened the German camps. And in one place it turns the moral argument on the alliance. Of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: bombs dropped "without any military necessity", killing "many thousands of innocent people", "a senseless, cruel and barbarous crime against not only the Japanese people, but also mankind as a whole." Whatever else is true of this book, that judgement has worn better than most of what was written about those two mornings in 1945 in English.
Now the catastrophe. The book does not pretend it was a triumph, and it does not use the alibi that the Red Army had planned to retreat. It says the divisions were under strength, that formations were still being raised, that men called up on the eve of the war "had no time to receive adequate military training." And then it says this:
The preparation of the country's defences was also affected by the serious miscalculations made by J. V. Stalin in his assessment of the overall military and strategic situation and the possible timing of the German attack.
Stalin, it continues, "believed right till the last moment that it would be possible to ward off the impending war through diplomatic means"; "The troops in the western military districts were not put on standby alert in time"; the warning directive went out only on the evening of 21 June and did not reach many units. This is the Khrushchev-era judgement, kept alive under Brezhnev, and it is true as far as it goes. It is also the entire indictment. Every other cause is external: German industrial superiority, the resources of conquered Europe, surprise.
What is not there is the Red Army's own command. In June 1941 the Soviet officer corps was four years out from a slaughter that had removed three of five marshals, thirteen of fifteen army commanders, and the overwhelming majority of corps and divisional commanders. The book says nothing about it. Not a clause, not a euphemism.
The proof is in the index. Tukhachevsky appears once in this volume, on page 92. So do Uborevich, Yakir and Yegorov — the same page, the same sentence. That page is not in the war chapter. It is in Chapter Two, in a list of the dead being posthumously readmitted to the record after 1953:
The Party carried out a great deal of work to curb infringements of socialist legality. Thousands of honest and innocent Party, Soviet, economic and Komsomol officials were rehabilitated. Among them were such prominent Party workers as A. S. Bubnov, N. A. Voznesensky, S. V. Kosior, N. V. Krylenko, A. A. Kuznetsov, P. P. Postyshev, M. I. Rodionov, Y. E. Rudzutak, V. Y. Chubar and R. I. Eikhe, the Komsomol leaders A. V. Kosarev and N. P. Chaplin, and the military leaders V. K. Blyukher, A. I. Yegorov, M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. P. Uborevich and I. E. Yakir.
Part Two's finding was that the names came back and the deaths went out: the marshals were praised as the founders of Soviet military science and then simply stopped appearing. Part Three completes the operation. Here the marshals exist only as names to be rehabilitated. They have no careers, no arrests, no trial, no executions and no bearing whatever on what happened to their army in June 1941. The word "rehabilitated" is asked to carry the whole event, and the reader who does not already know what it means will not learn it here. "Thousands", incidentally, is the book's figure. The Soviet Procuracy's own later accounting ran to hundreds of thousands, and the arrest totals of 1937–38 into the millions.
The reply was in print before the Wehrmacht reached Moscow. In Fourth International for December 1941, John G. Wright reconstructed from Pravda and Bolshevik the second, quieter purge of 1940–41 that stripped commissariat after commissariat — "The Kremlin's average during this period was approximately a Commissariat a day" — and noted that it "reached its peak in the months of April and May, i.e., on the very eve of Hitler's invasion." Forty years later Ernest Mandel put the long version of the same argument in The Meaning of the Second World War (1986). The purges, he wrote in "The Immediate Causes", "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR", while "The Red Army's complete lack of readiness in 1941 was the direct result of Stalin's disastrous misunderstanding of the political situation in Europe." In "Strategy" he is blunter: the unpreparedness "had been brought about largely by Stalin's criminal purge of the Red Army". Mandel also disposes of the retreat legend — "There is no substance whatsoever in such claims" — a legend this book, to its credit, does not use.
Mandel adds the piece the Soviet account structurally cannot contain: the secret protocol to the pact of August 1939, which partitioned Poland before the German invasion had begun. "Russian historiography continues to deny this", he writes, "by keeping silent." He is right about the silence and this volume maintains it. (Mandel's own text misdates the signature by four days; the protocol was signed on the night of 23 August 1939. The series holds its own tradition to the standard it applies to Progress.)
It should be said that Mandel is not writing a prosecution brief. He credits the Soviet recovery to the same thing this book credits it to: the industrial base built by the planned economy, which allowed the USSR to absorb losses that destroyed Tsarism in 1917. On that, the Moscow historians and the Fourth International agree, and both are right. There is even a small convergence of anecdote: the book quotes Halder — printed here, through the scanner, as "General Franz Haider" — saying "Soviet Russia was just like a pane of glass: if you struck it once with your fist, it would shatter immediately", and Mandel records that the same officer expected the war won in four weeks.
In 1943 and 1944 the Soviet state deported entire nations eastward: Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, and — from 1941 — the Volga Germans. Hundreds of thousands died in transit and in the special settlements. This book narrates none of it.
What it gives is the reversal without the act:
The Party condemned distortions in the implementation of the nationalities policy that had been committed during the war years in respect of individual peoples, and restored national autonomy to the Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushes and Karachays.
Read it slowly. Something called a "distortion" was "committed" — no agent, no verb of transport, no destination. Autonomy is "restored" to five peoples whose loss of it was never mentioned. And the peoples missing from the list are precisely those whose autonomy was not restored: the Crimean Tatars, deported wholesale in May 1944 and not permitted to return in any numbers until the very end of the Soviet Union, and the Volga Germans, whose republic was abolished in 1941 and never re-established. The list is not a summary. It is a boundary: the state records the wrongs it has undone and does not record the ones it is still doing.
This series found the identical construction in a 1968 volume. Finding it again in 1982, unaltered in wording and in logic, tells us it was not an editorial accident but a rule.
The Crimean Tatars do appear in this book, in a manner of speaking. The Chronological Summary for 19 February 1954 reads: "Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issues a decree transferring the Crimea Region from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR." A peninsula changes republics; nobody asks who is no longer living on it. Tatars elsewhere are heroes — a Tatar among the eleven defenders of the hill at Stalingrad, the poet Musa Dzhalil tortured to death in Spandau. Tatars are honoured and Crimean Tatars do not exist. And in the Conclusion the volume states that "the working class resolved the national question."
Chapter Two contains this book's account of de-Stalinisation, and it is a remarkable piece of writing, chiefly for who is not in it.
The Congress is dated exactly — "held in Moscow on the 14–25 February 1956", 1,436 delegates — and its foreign-policy innovations are set out at length: peaceful coexistence, war no longer fatally inevitable, plural roads to socialism. Then, without transition, comes the criticism of the personality cult, and it arrives as pure abstraction. The Party was guided by "the well-known Marxist-Leninist propositions on the role of the masses, the Party and the individual in history and on the inadmissibility of the cult of an individual political leader, no matter how great his merits." The reader is told that criticism might be "seized upon by its enemies for anti-Soviet use" and that the Party proceeded anyway. The public reference point given is not the Congress session of 24–25 February at all but the Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956, "On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences". And the balance is struck: "The Party discerned two aspects in Stalin's activities: a positive aspect which it valued and a negative one which it criticised and condemned."
Nobody delivered this. Khrushchev is named three times in the entire volume: elected First Secretary in September 1953; removed in October 1964; and in the index, with two page references, neither in the pages covering the Twentieth Congress. Stalin's index entry gives eight pages, and none of them falls in that section either. A history published in Moscow in 1982 describes the criticism of the cult of Stalin's personality across ten pages in which, by its own index, Stalin is not discussed and Khrushchev is not present.
Nor is there a victim, a number, a camp or a trial. The Terror is personified in one man: "The exposure of the criminal activities of the political adventurist Lavrenty Beria was of great importance in this respect", he having "trumped up numerous 'cases' against honest workers" and "blatantly infringed socialist legality", after which "the crimes of Beria and his accomplices were brought to light, and their deserved punishment was duly meted out." The Leningrad Affair is never named, though three of its dead — Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, Rodionov — stand in the rehabilitation list. The Doctors' Plot of 1953 is absent entirely: the words do not occur. The postwar campaigns in literature and music leave no mark on the culture chapter. The camps do not exist in this book except as German ones.
The Fourth International's assessment was published while the Congress's echo was still audible. M. Stein's "The End of the Stalin Cult: The Meaning of the 20th Congress" appeared in Fourth International, vol. 17 no. 2, Spring 1956. "The Twentieth Congress will be remembered as the congress that laid the Stalin cult to rest," he wrote, and identified whose interest that served: the cult was "built on the bones of the best of the revolutionary generation that founded the Soviet Union and at the expense of the Soviet working class", and "finally became insupportable even for the bureaucracy which was its sole beneficiary." Stein also pointed to something no Soviet text of 1982 could mention: the camp strikes of 1953 and 1954, at Vorkuta and elsewhere, which formed part of the pressure the bureaucracy was answering. Twenty-six years later, this volume's version of the same events has an agent — "the Party" — that acts on itself, alone, out of principle.
Hungary in October and November 1956 is disposed of in one paragraph. The events "were provoked by foreign reactionary circles and by counter-revolutionary elements within the country"; "The capital and several provincial towns were swept by a savage wave of white terror"; a Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Government under Kádár "requested help from the Soviet Union", and the Soviet government, "Discharging its internationalist duty", "helped the revolutionary forces of Hungary to put down the rising."
Two things are wrong with this beyond the framing. Kádár's government was constituted after the second Soviet intervention had begun, not before it, and the workers' councils that were the rising's central institution — the Greater Budapest Central Workers' Council, which called and sustained a general strike into December — are not mentioned. There were reprisals against Communists in Budapest, some of them lethal; the book's "white terror" makes them the substance of the events rather than an episode within them. Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker's correspondent in Hungary, whose dispatches his paper refused to print and who resigned and published Hungarian Tragedy the same year, is the readiest English witness to what the councils were and what was done to them.
Czechoslovakia in 1968 gets more space and reads, oddly, more defensively. The book concedes that the January plenum's decisions "to improve Party and state leadership and to develop socialist democracy" were "perfectly justified", then explains that "Right-wing, revisionist elements acquired great influence in the central Party bodies and in the Government, as well as in the mass media", and that consequently "five Warsaw Treaty countries—the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR and Poland—sent their troops into Czechoslovakia on the 21 August 1968." The verdict is not offered in the authors' own voice: it is quoted from the Czechoslovak Central Committee plenum of December 1970, which called the entry of the troops "an act of internationalist solidarity". A body reconstituted after the occupation is cited to authorise the occupation.
The Fourth International's answer to that is dated 22 August 1968, the day after the tanks crossed, and was printed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 6 no. 28, 2 September 1968. "The United Secretariat of the Fourth International condemns the military occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the nations of the Warsaw Pact," it began, and identified what the Kremlin actually feared: not counter-revolution but "the first beginnings of workers democracy", and behind them "the incompatibility of its dictatorship, power and privileges with any form of workers democracy." On the pretext of an appeal by unnamed statesmen — which this volume, fourteen years on, no longer even attempts to repeat — the statement noted that their identity remained unrevealed forty-eight hours after the event. In the same issue Joseph Hansen described the emergency Fourteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, held on 21–22 August in a factory in the Prague suburbs, guarded by the people's militia, which condemned the invasion by an overwhelming majority. That congress is not in this book. Neither is Dubček's name. Ludvík Svoboda is here, once, as the commander of the 1st Czechoslovak Brigade in the fighting for Kiev in 1943 — and not as the President who was flown to Moscow in August 1968.
The last chapter is the Brezhnev settlement stated as history: developed socialism, the 1977 Constitution, the Peace Programme, the Twenty-Sixth Congress. The 1964 removal of Khrushchev is rendered as a plenum condemning "subjectivism and voluntarism in government" — the ejection of a General Secretary as a matter of administrative principle. Afghanistan is present and current: "Upon the request of the Afghan Government, a limited Soviet military contingent was sent into the country and it helped the democratic regime combat counter-revolution." Poland appears once, obliquely, as a dangerous situation in late 1980 and early 1981 noted by the Congress; Solidarity is not named. The book was in press as martial law was declared in Warsaw.
That is where the trilogy ends, and the shape of it is worth stating plainly, because it is not the shape the slogans predict. Part One dropped the criminal charges against Trotsky and left him out of the Name Index while indexing two tsarist police chiefs. Part Two printed Lenin's Testament including the proposal to remove Stalin, and could not name the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; it gave the machinery of dekulakisation in archival detail and reduced the famine of 1932–33 to a clause about "draught and crop failure". Part Three gives twenty million dead, names Stalin's miscalculation of June 1941, and cannot say what happened to the men who should have commanded the armies that met the attack. Three volumes, three decades of revision, one constant: the accusations were withdrawn, the arithmetic was published, and the erasures held.
There is real scholarship here, and a reader who wants the Soviet war economy, the evacuation of industry beyond the Urals, or the reconstruction of the Donbas will find it set out by people who knew the material. Read Chapter One beside Mandel's chapters on strategy and on the unfolding world battle, and read Wright's December 1941 piece for what the Fourth International could establish about the state of Soviet industry and administration from the Soviet press alone, while it was happening. Then go back to page 92, to the sentence in which five of the Red Army's commanders appear for the only time in a history of the war they did not live to fight, and consider what a history is for.