The thesis of this book is stated on its first page and never afterwards complicated: revolutions provoke counter-revolutions, and the reactionary classes, unable to hold power at home, call in help from abroad — "sweeping campaigns of lies and slander," "subversion and sabotage," "economic blockade, and finally, armed invasion, all of which constitute the export of counter-revolution." From there František Kolár runs the idea across almost five centuries. The Hussite crusades of the fifteenth century; the coalition of monarchies against the French Revolution; Tsar Nicholas I's army crushing the Hungarian revolution of 1849; the Prussian and Versaillais siege of the Paris Commune; the fourteen-power intervention against Soviet Russia in 1918–20; the Western abandonment of the Spanish Republic; Vietnam, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan — the survey is genuinely long, briskly written, and organised into some three dozen short thematic chapters. An afterword is supplied by Vitaly Korionov, a Pravda political observer, which places the book squarely inside the Soviet foreign-affairs establishment rather than at its scholarly margins.
Date the argument, not the spine. The copyright page reads © Progress Publishers 1983, and unusually for this series there is no lag to correct: the book is contemporaneous with its jacket. Its latest events are the martial law imposed in Poland on 13 December 1981, Reagan's March 1981 remarks on aid to the Afghan insurgents, and the "Polish events of 1980–1982." This is a book of the Second Cold War, written at its coldest — the Euromissile crisis, the war in Afghanistan, Solidarity crushed — and it was written to be a weapon in that conflict, not a study of it. That is the right frame for reading it, and it is also the frame in which its central problem becomes unmissable.
The problem is not that the category is empty. It is that the category is real, and the book holds it to only one side.
"Export of counter-revolution" describes something that has repeatedly happened. Kolár is on solid ground for long stretches, and an honest introduction has to say so before it says anything else. His chapter on the intervention against Soviet Russia is substantially accurate history. Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and eleven other states did land troops on Russian soil, arm the White generals, and blockade the young republic between 1918 and 1920; "Counter-revolution was exported in the most frank way" is not propaganda but a fair description of an actual war. His chapter on Spain is likewise sound in its main charge: the Popular Front government was legally elected, Franco's officers mutinied against it with German and Italian arms, and the Anglo-French policy of "non-intervention" — proclaimed, as he notes, by the French Socialist premier Léon Blum — was in practice a slow strangling of the Republic while the Soviet Union "was the only country to give active and extensive support to the Spanish Republican Government." The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the Paris Commune, the coalition wars against revolutionary France: in each, the essential shape of the story — an internal reaction reinforced from outside — is correctly drawn. Where Kolár describes imperialist counter-revolution, he is often simply describing what occurred, and the reader is better off for having the sequence laid out.
What turns a defensible thesis into a propaganda instrument is that the mirror only ever faces outward. In the whole 500-year sweep, armed intervention across a border to crush a revolution is a crime committed exclusively by the West and its predecessors. The Warsaw Pact never appears in the dock, though within the living memory of the book's author it had marched into two capitals to reverse two revolutions, and was at that moment fighting a third war beyond its southern border. The test for a book like this is not whether it uses the word "opportunism" or "counter-revolution" often, nor whether it quotes its enemies fairly. It is simpler and harder: can the category the book defines ever be turned on the author's own side? Here the answer is a flat no — and the interest of the book is that we can watch it say no, at length, about the very events that fit its definition best.
One might expect a Soviet-bloc book of 1983 to secure this asymmetry by silence — simply to omit 1956, 1968, Afghanistan, Poland. It does the opposite, and the opposite is more revealing. Kolár names all four, devotes a full chapter to each, and re-describes each so that the tanks change sides.
Hungary, 1956, appears under the chapter title "Hungarian Putsch." The revolution is "essentially fascist counter-revolution"; Imre Nagy — arrested and, though the book does not say so, hanged in 1958 — is "revisionist and traitor who had wormed his way to the top." The Soviet military assault on Budapest is rendered as its opposite: the Kádár government "asked the Soviet Union to help it oppose the counter-revolution," and "the Soviet government met that request and resolutely came out against the imperialist export of counter-revolution." The one genuine armed invasion in the chapter — the Red Army's — is thus recoded as resistance to invasion. Note the trick of grammar that makes it work: the Soviet Union "met that request," an act of assent, never an act of force.
Czechoslovakia, 1968, is the crucial case, because it was Kolár's own country and he was writing inside it during the long "normalisation" that followed. His chapter is titled "Abortive Attempt to Take Revenge," and it treats the Prague Spring as a counter-revolutionary plot to undo the "February 1948 triumph" — the reformers around Ota Šik become "right-wing opportunists" scheming to restore capitalism; Alexander Dubček, the movement's leader, is not named once in the entire book. The invasion of 21 August 1968 — some half a million Warsaw Pact troops, the largest military operation in Europe since 1945 — is dissolved into a single sentence in the passive voice: "the internationalist aid by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Treaty allies" of Czechoslovakia "was called for in order to foil the plans of exporting counterrevolution and to preclude bloodshed. This step was necessary and had no alternative." (The book's own spelling of the word drifts between hyphenated and solid; quotations here follow the printed page.) A Czech writer, describing the occupation of Prague by foreign armies, produces a sentence in which no army occupies anything and no agent acts: aid "was called for," a step "was necessary." Fifteen years later the defeated reformers who signed Charter 77 are dismissed in the Poland chapter as "the bankrupts of 1968." The book cannot see that its own governing concept — counter-revolution carried across a border by armed force to reverse a movement for reform — is the exact description of what the Soviet Union did to the country in which its author sat writing.
Afghanistan receives the chapter "Hatred of the Saur Revolution," and here the book reproduces, almost to the phrase, the official formula the Soviet foreign-policy literature of these years used everywhere. After the December 1979 coup that installed Babrak Karmal — the killing of Hafizullah Amin passing as the removal of a usurper — "in response to repeated requests from the Afghan government, the Soviet Union performed its internationalist duty and brought a limited contingent of its troops to Afghanistan to help the Afghan people repel the armed aggression from without," an act said to accord "fully" with Article 51 of the UN Charter. The war was three and a half years old when Kolár wrote this. Aggression is exclusively American; the Soviet expeditionary force is "a limited contingent," present only to "repel" someone else's aggression.
Poland, 1980–81, gets the longest of the four chapters, "The West Looks for a 'Weak Link.'" Solidarity — at its height a ten-million-member workers' movement — is presented throughout as a fabrication of Western intelligence: the KOR intellectuals were "sanctioned by Western secret services," the free-union idea "came from abroad and was financed in dollars," and the whole rising was scripted in a Brzezinski memorandum. When the strikes forced the recognition of the independent unions, "this legalisation enabled the reactionary forces to engage in overt political struggle against the Polish United Workers' Party." The declaration of martial law on 13 December 1981 appears only obliquely — as the moment American radio stations doubled their Polish broadcasts — while the crushing of the union is folded into the claim that "external and internal counter-revolution dealt it a blow." A general seizing power against a trade union at the head of tanks is, in this telling, not counter-revolution; the trade union is.
The reflexive blindness has a perfect emblem inside the book itself. Kolár writes with real feeling about Budapest in 1919, when foreign invasion and Entente blockade strangled Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic — a genuine export of counter-revolution. Two hundred pages later he writes about Budapest in 1956, when Soviet armour entered the same city, and this time the invasion is salvation. Same capital, foreign tanks in both, and only one set of tanks counts. The book never notices that it has told the story twice with the verdict reversed.
And the contradiction is sometimes visible on a single page. In his closing hymn to the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, Kolár quotes its founding preamble for "the principles of respect for the independence and sovereignty of states and non-interference in their internal affairs" — six hundred lines after he has praised that same organisation's interference in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia as "necessary" and having "no alternative." The general summation is baldest of all: "Soviet foreign policy of peace has always emphatically rejected both the export of revolution and the export of counter-revolution," and the socialist countries "consider it inadmissible and even criminal to attempt the export of counterrevolution in any form." The book means every word. That is what makes it a document rather than a lie — the author does not appear to be concealing the invasions; he has genuinely reclassified them, and the category has been built so that it can never catch him.
Two questions, then, dispose of the book's method, and they are worth stating because they generalise to the whole shelf of Soviet foreign-affairs writing this series reprints. First: is each accusation attached to a described act that could be shown not to have happened? Often it is — the Brzezinski memorandum, the Radio Free Europe broadcasts, the Dulles brothers' remarks are all, in principle, checkable, and some are real. Second: could the category, as the book defines it, ever be applied to the author's own state? Never. It is the second failure, not the first, that convicts the book. A concept of "exported counter-revolution" that cannot be predicated of Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, and Kabul 1979 is not a historical category at all; it is a badge of allegiance.
There is a second, quieter kind of selectivity, and noticing it guards against the opposite error — of imagining that the book at least gets the Western crimes right and only falsifies the Eastern ones. Its coverage of imperialist counter-revolution is itself oddly thin exactly where the postwar record is most damning. A book whose entire subject is the covert overthrow of revolutionary and reforming governments manages not to narrate the two textbook cases. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran is absent — Iran appears once, only as the country from which the CIA is said to have relocated a regional office. The 1954 coup against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala is absent — Guatemala appears once, buried in a list of United States interventions of 1903–1924. Even Chile, the crime the book most wants, is handled at arm's length: the 1973 coup is mentioned twice, once as an example of a "reactionary coup" and once as "the overthrow of the Popular Unity government," but Salvador Allende is never named and nor is Pinochet. The book that exists to catalogue exported counter-revolution cannot bring itself to write the individual histories of the clearest exported counter-revolutions of its own lifetime — perhaps because close narration invites the reader to ask about the symmetrical cases in the East, and the safest register is the general one.
The Spanish chapter carries the sharpest omission of all. Kolár's account of Western betrayal is true as far as it goes, but it stops precisely where the Soviet role becomes uncomfortable. Not a word here about the other force that was exported into Republican Spain after 1936: the Terror. The suppression of the POUM, the murder of Andreu Nin, the settling of Moscow's scores in Barcelona in May 1937 — the intervention that came from the East — falls into total silence, because it cannot be told inside a book whose thesis requires the Soviet Union to be the Republic's only friend. The word POUM does not occur. This is the recurring signature of the series: the true half of a story told with genuine energy, and the half that would implicate Moscow left blank.
The deepest thing the book conceals is that a consistent anti-imperialist position was available in 1983 and had been for decades — one that opposed the export of counter-revolution from both directions — and that it was held, in print, by the tradition this series speaks from. The Fourth International and the wider anti-Stalinist left condemned the CIA coups, the war in Vietnam, and the strangling of the Spanish Republic as fiercely as Kolár does; they also condemned the tanks in Budapest and Prague and Kabul, which he cannot. That combination is not a paradox but a principle, and it was worked out in exactly the moments Kolár rewrites.
On 1956, the American Socialist Workers Party's International Socialist Review did not wait for the archives. In its Summer 1956 issue it read the June uprising in Poznań as an "independent working-class struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy," and by the Fall 1956 number — "Revolution in Poland and Hungary," vol. 17 no. 4 — it wrote that "the Polish and Hungarian workers launched a general revolutionary uprising against the rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy… rallied around the demand for complete national independence and workers democracy." Where Kolár sees a "fascist putsch" organised by Radio Free Europe, the contemporaneous revolutionary left saw a workers' political revolution — the very thing his tradition claimed to want, breaking out against his tradition's state.
On 1968, the reply is even more direct. The issue of Intercontinental Press dated 2 September 1968 (vol. 6 no. 28) carried on its cover the demand "End the Soviet Occupation!" and inside, Joseph Hansen's article "A Political Disaster for the Kremlin," which took apart the "counterrevolution" pretext as "a fiction to cover up" a decision already taken to intervene, and drew the exact parallel Kolár suppresses — to the fate of "the Hungarian leaders in 1956." Through the autumn of 1968 the paper ran week after week of eyewitness material from Czechoslovakia, precisely the reporting Kolár's chapter treats as enemy propaganda. The occupation he calls internationalist aid, the revolutionary press of the day called an occupation and demanded be ended.
Behind these particular judgments stands the analysis the book most needs its readers not to have read: Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society deserves to be measured. Its argument — that a privileged bureaucratic caste had raised itself above the working class and now defended its own rule under the banner of socialism — is the missing premise that makes sense of everything Kolár cannot explain. Once the Warsaw Pact is understood as the armed guarantor of that caste rather than of "the socialist accomplishments of the fraternal countries," the invasions of 1956, 1968, and 1979 stop being anomalies to be explained away and become exactly what the theory predicts: a bureaucracy exporting counter-revolution to protect itself from workers who might do to it what the Hungarians and Czechs were trying to do. The reader who wants the reply to this book in one sentence has it in the book's own vocabulary: the export of counter-revolution is real, and between 1953 and 1981 the state that commissioned this book was among its most practised agents.
That is why the volume is worth reprinting rather than dismissing. Read as history it is unreliable in a patterned, instructive way; read as evidence it is first-rate. It shows, more clearly than any hostile summary could, how a genuine idea — that reaction crosses borders by force to kill revolutions — was fitted with a one-way mirror, so that the citizen of the bloc that had just done exactly that could survey five centuries of it and never once see his own reflection. Kolár's Czechoslovakia had been invaded fifteen years before he sat down to write about the export of counter-revolution. The most important sentence in the book is the one he did not know he was writing.