This is a book of fragments. Counting the source lines it prints beneath each passage — the form is "…, Vol. 30, p. 373" — the eight sections and the appendix carry some four hundred and forty of them across about eighty thousand words of Lenin. That is an average of well under two hundred words per extract: a sentence from a letter, a marginal note from the Hegel conspectus, a paragraph from a Duma speech, a telegram. The compilers, who sign the preface, are P. N. Denisov and N. A. Kondrashov. They state their method plainly and without evasion:
The translations are taken from the English edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works in 45 volumes prepared by Progress Publishers, Moscow, except where otherwise noted. Corrections have been made in accordance with the Fifth Russian Edition of the Collected Works.
That sentence is also the origin of a catalogue error. Progress is named here as the source of the translations, not as the publisher of this book. The only publisher's imprint recoverable from the volume is on its final leaf, where three forthcoming titles are advertised — Davydov, Kuzmenko, Markov — each under the heading RADUGA PUBLISHERS, two "Coming out in 1983" and one "Coming out in 1984". The Soviet imprint code in the front matter ends -83. So the date on the spine is right, and the house is very probably Raduga rather than Progress. The front matter of this scan is badly damaged and I would not stake much on the attribution; but a reader should know that the book never once calls itself a Progress book.
The stated audience is broad and academic: "It is recommended for linguists in all fields, specialists on literature, philosophy, history, sociology and social sciences, and also for everyone with an interest in these problems." This is an export volume for foreign philologists, and it should be read as one.
Before anything else, the thing that is not here.
Soviet linguistics has a history, and it is not an obscure one. From the late 1920s the discipline was dominated by the "Japhetic theory" of N. Y. Marr, who held among other things that language possesses a class character and belongs to the superstructure. Marr died in 1934 and his school ruled after him. On 20 June 1950 Pravda carried an article by Stalin, "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics", followed by further replies over July and August and collected as Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, which demolished Marr's doctrine by name — the class-character formula, Stalin wrote, had put linguistics "into a muddle" — and reversed the discipline's official position overnight. It is one of the very few occasions on which a General Secretary intervened directly and personally in a scientific field. Careers were destroyed in both directions: Marrists who had spent twenty years enforcing the theory, and the linguists they had displaced.
A 1983 Moscow anthology of Lenin on language sits downstream of that event. Here is what it says about it.
Marr: zero. Marrism: zero. Japhetic: zero. Meshchaninov: zero. Vinogradov: zero. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics: zero. The apparent two hits for "Marr" in a raw search are the words marriage and married; the project's own false-nil checker, run against this book, surfaces only Marx and Marxism as near-neighbours. The silence is real.
None of this can be excused as anachronism. The rule this series applies — that an absence counts only where the author had the fact and a reason to use it — protects a 1976 book from being convicted of not knowing about Reagan. It does not protect this one. The 1950 intervention was thirty-three years past, entirely public, published in English by Moscow itself, and squarely inside the subject. Denisov and Kondrashov are professional linguists writing a preface on the theoretical foundations of Marxist linguistics. They could not have been unaware of it. They wrote around it.
And they wrote around it with some care. The volume's Section III is headed "Language and the Class Struggle" — a title that reads, to anyone who knows the history, like the Marrist thesis Stalin killed. It is not. Its contents are entirely about Lenin's polemical practice: Mikhailovsky's "brilliant phrase combined with lack of substance", the ministers who said social when they meant socialist, the "worthless little rag" Svoboda, the hollow "protective" labour law announced "with a blare of trumpets". Language used in the class struggle, never language as a class phenomenon. The heading is heretical and the contents are not. That is not carelessness; it is navigation.
The preface's own framing sentence shows the same balance being held:
As we know, the teaching of the founders of scientific communism provides a theoretical and methodological basis for any branch of scientific knowledge. This also applies fully to linguistics.
That proposition is exactly the one which licensed Marrism, and then licensed its destruction. It is stated here as a truism, thirty-three years after it cost a discipline two of its generations, with no indication that anything had ever followed from it. Saussure, Baudouin de Courtenay and Durkheim are named in the preface without hostility — which under Marr would have been impossible — and the reader is given no way to know that this was ever in question.
There is a smaller marker of the same register. The preface states that "The theories of the Vienna logical positivists (Wittgenstein and others) with their exaggerated attention to language aroused Lenin's reasoned objections." Lenin died in January 1924. The Tractatus appeared in German in 1921; Schlick took the Vienna chair in 1922; the circle that took its name from the city cohered after Lenin's death and issued its manifesto in 1929. In the whole book Wittgenstein occurs exactly once — in that sentence — and never inside a Lenin extract. The claim is not a falsification of history so much as a habit: the preface reaches for an objection Lenin never made because the genre requires that he made all of them.
None of which makes this a worthless book, and on its central subject it is a good deal better than its preface.
Lenin on the national question and language is genuinely liberal material, and the volume prints a lot of it. Section IV runs to 22,500 words and it does not flinch from the awkward parts. Sections 2 to 6 of "Critical Remarks on the National Question" are here, including "There are two national cultures in every national culture" and the whole demolition of cultural-national autonomy. So is the Norway–Sweden argument, where secession is credited with having strengthened the ties between the two peoples. So is "On the National Pride of the Great Russians".
Most importantly, the 1914 Proletarskaya Pravda article "Is a Compulsory Official Language Needed?" is printed complete and unabridged. I checked it word for word against the canonical text in Collected Works vol. 20, pp. 71–73: apart from scanner noise the two are identical, and nothing is cut. It is the sharpest thing Lenin wrote on the subject, and the volume gives all of it:
What we do not want is the element of coercion. We do not want to have people driven into paradise with a cudgel; for no matter how many fine phrases about "culture" you may utter, a compulsory official language involves coercion, the use of the cudgel.
The post-revolutionary material is no softer. The volume prints Lenin's concluding speech to the Eighth Congress in March 1919, complaining of Communists at the Commissariat of Education who say "that our schools are uniform schools, and therefore don't dare to teach in any language but Russian! In my opinion, such a Communist is a Great-Russian chauvinist" — followed by "Scratch some Communists and you will find Great-Russian chauvinists." It prints the Central Committee draft resolution on the Ukraine, which makes it "incumbent upon all Party members to use every means to help remove all barriers in the way of the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture", and requires them to "in every way counteract attempts at Russification". It prints the telegram to Stalin of 22 February 1920 on Ukrainian-language paperwork at army headquarters: "as far as language is concerned there must be every concession and the maximum of equality."
A Soviet reader of 1983 who read only Section IV would come away with an accurate and demanding picture of Lenin's position, and would have every ground on which to complain about the country he lived in. That is worth saying plainly. The constraint in this book does not attach to the topic. It attaches to whose voice is speaking — the extracts are free and the preface is not, which is a shape this series has met before.
There is exactly one place where the extracts themselves are cut, and it is the place you would predict.
The last item in Section IV, and the closing line of the section, is a single sentence:
Fourthly, the strictest rules must be introduced on the use of the national language in the non-Russian republics of our union, and these rules must be checked with special care.
It is sourced to "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation'", Collected Works vol. 36, p. 610. That is Lenin's note dictated on 30 and 31 December 1922, at the end of his working life, and it is the document in which he broke with Stalin over Georgia. Nothing else from it appears in the book. There is no "Firstly", no "Secondly", no "Thirdly". There is no note explaining what the text is; the volume's notes apparatus, which glosses Volapük, the Ophen dialect of travelling pedlars, the Brünn Congress and the Beilis trial, has nothing whatever on Georgia, on 1922, or on the circumstances of this dictation.
Set against the canonical text, this is what the closing quotation mark removes. Immediately before:
Thirdly, exemplary punishment must be inflicted on Comrade Orjonikidze (I say this all the more regretfully as I am one of his personal friends and have worked with him abroad) and the investigation of all the material which Dzerzhinsky's commission has collected must be completed or started over again to correct the enormous mass of wrongs and biased judgments which it doubtlessly contains. The political responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.
And immediately after — inside the very same paragraph, two sentences later:
There is no doubt that our apparatus being what it is, there is bound to be, on the pretext of unity in the railway service, unity in the fiscal service and so on, a mass of truly Russian abuses. […] A detailed code will be required, and only the nationals living in the republic in question can draw it up at all successfully.
So the cut is not between documents. It is mid-paragraph, one sentence in. What goes is the reason for the rule (a mass of truly Russian abuses, coming from the apparatus itself), the identity of the rule-maker (the nationals of the republic, not Moscow), and the name of the man held politically responsible. What survives is a procedural instruction that could have been issued by any ministry.
This is the fifth instance the series has recorded of the same operation, and it is the tightest. In the others — Lukin stopping one sentence before Sholokhov's answer, Basmanov quoting Posadas without the clause that says Posadas is not in the Fourth International, Leibson closing the Fourth International's letter at "supports you", the four words of the 1916 disarmament polemic that became a book title — the cut falls at the turn of an argument. Here it falls at a proper noun.
A caution about method, because I nearly got this wrong in the other direction. Searching this text for Autonomisation returns zero, and I was ready to report the note as entirely absent. It is not absent; the scanner prints Aulonomisation, with an l for the n. The whole finding above would have been inverted by a single character, and the corrected version — Moscow printed one sentence of the note and nothing else — is much more interesting than the flat silence I first thought I had found.
The same volume shows why the cut was necessary at exactly that point. Its name index runs to about a hundred and ten entries and annotates almost everyone: Cratylus, Renan, Radishchev, Scheidemann, Südekum, Sipyagin, Kokoshkin. Trotsky is there, given an essence and no act — "continued his struggle against the Soviet state and the CPSU, against the international communist movement". Bukharin, Pyatakov and Ryazanov are there, each with the year of his expulsion and none with the year of his death. Stalin's name occurs four times in the body of the book, as the addressee of Lenin's telegrams and letters. He has no entry in the name index at all. The alphabetical run goes Skaldin, Stolypin, Struve. This is the sharper form of the test: error is admissible in these books, the category is not, and here even the name is not — not because Stalin is unmentionable in 1983, but because any gloss on him in this particular volume would have had to touch the two things the volume exists to avoid.
Which brings us to the one sentence in the preface that is not evasion but assertion, and which the book's own contents refute.
He was opposed to the imposing by force of a single state language and consistently supported proletarian internationalism. After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution the peoples acquired freedom of national and linguistic development in the Soviet Union. As a result of the fraternal collaboration of the socialist nations, Russian became, without any coercive measures, the second native language for the broad masses of the national and autonomous republics and regions of the Soviet state, the language of international communication of the peoples of the Land of the Soviets.
The first clause is true, and the book proves it over twenty-two thousand words. The last is false, and it is false in a way that is documentable rather than arguable. On 13 March 1938 the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on the compulsory study of the Russian language in the schools of the national republics and regions. It made Russian a required subject from the first grade in every school in the USSR, and it remained in force for the rest of the Soviet period. Whatever else may be said for or against it, it was a coercive measure, and it is the measure that made Russian what the preface says it became without one. This is not a silence. It is a claim, and, as this series has found before, a claim is worth more to a critic than a silence, because it can be checked.
The record around it is worse than a single decree. Ukrainianisation was pursued through the 1920s and reversed at the turn of the 1930s, with the men who had carried it out destroyed. The deported nations — the Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans, the Chechens and Ingush, the Kalmyks, the Karachai, the Meskhetians — lost not only their homelands but the institutional basis of their languages. A companion volume in this series, Semyonov's Nations and Internationalism (1979), printed the demographic trace of one of those deportations in a table and misread it, with the other deported peoples at zero. This book does not print the trace at all: Kalmyk occurs once, as the name of a Petersburg bookshop Lenin used; Crimean Tatar, Volga German, Meskhetian, Karachai, Chechen and Ingush are all at zero.
And Moscow knew the word for what it had been doing. In the spring of 1953, in the weeks after Stalin's death, the leadership publicly removed the first secretary of the Ukrainian party for, among other things, forcing Russian into western Ukrainian schools — an admission made in Moscow's own name, and one the preface of 1983 writes as though it had never occurred.
The reply exists, it is specific, and on the central point it is thirty years old.
Michel Pablo's "The Post-Stalin 'New Course'" appeared in Fourth International vol. XIV no. 2 (whole no. 121). The issue is printed as March–April 1953, but that date is unreliable — its articles discuss events of the following summer, and this one reports the removal of the Ukrainian first secretary Melnikov, so it was written in mid-1953 at the earliest. Pablo records that Melnikov "was accused of having tried to 'Russify' the Ukraine and especially the western areas (belonging to Poland) for one thing, by the compulsory introduction of the Russian language into the schools", and that the Lithuanian party leadership was censured for "like extremes of 'Russification'". The charge in the 1983 preface — that Russian spread without coercive measures — was contradicted, in public, by the Soviet leadership itself, and reported at the time in the Fourth International's own press.
There is a second contemporaneous witness on the linguistics question, and honesty requires that it be labelled. Albert Glotzer, writing as Albert Gates in The New International vol. XIX no. 3 (whole no. 159), May–June 1953, is writing for Max Shachtman's Independent Socialist League — the other side of the 1940 split, not this series' own tradition, and not the Fourth International. With that said, his account of the 1950 intervention is the one this book cannot give. Stalin, he writes, "had never until the very last years of his life shown any interest or accomplishment in the field of linguistics or philology, or science"; the interventions "in these fields, as in philology, literature and science were the result not of any compelling political need" but of a man who "believed he could do it by decree".
And on language rights the closest reply in date is the best. Five years before this anthology appeared, Intercontinental Press published Marilyn Vogt's "Moscow Forced to Back Down: Protests Over Language Rights in Georgia and Armenia" — vol. 16 no. 19, 15 May 1978, dated from the masthead. In April 1978 Moscow attempted to drop from the new constitutions of the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani republics the clauses guaranteeing the indigenous language as the republic's official language. Hundreds of students and faculty marched through Tbilisi carrying placards demanding their "native language", and the clause was restored in all three. The Georgian party first secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, went out to the demonstration, conceded the point, and then added:
Again we have to tell our native people and our youth that equal with our esteem for the native language, equal with studying the native language, if we want to aspire to the light, if we want to take possession of sciences and keep in touch with current world civilization, it is necessary to respect and study the wonderful and rich language of the Russian people!
The same article carries the Armenian Helsinki Monitoring Group's account: "On the average," they state, "every year in Yerevan [capital of the Armenian republic] one Armenian school is closed and in its place a Russian school is opened."
And Vogt's article quotes Lenin's December 1922 note — quotes the sentence this anthology prints, and the sentence this anthology stops before:
"The strictest rules must be introduced on the use of the national language in the non-Russian republics of our union. . . . There is no doubt that our apparatus being what it is, there is bound to be, on the pretext of unity . . . a mass of truly Russian abuses."
That is the whole case in one juxtaposition. Five years before Moscow printed one sentence of that paragraph in a book about Lenin and language, a weekly in New York printed the sentence and its sequel and used them against Moscow. And, as Vogt notes, the Georgian oppositionist Zviad Gamsakhurdia had already made the same use of the same article in an open letter to the Georgian Writers' Union in April 1976 — for which he was arrested the following year.
Two honest limits on that reply. First, our holdings on this subject are thin outside one window: sweeping 413 Intercontinental Press issues — 1972, 1973 and every year from 1978 to the paper's close in August 1986 — every hit on Russification and Soviet language policy falls in 1978 and 1979, and there is nothing at all from 1980 onward. International Viewpoint's coverage begins later still. That is a fact about what we hold, not a verdict on the book. Second, on Marr and the 1950 intervention specifically, our own tradition's press is nearly as quiet as the anthology: the Shachtmanite passage above is the only sustained treatment I could find in nearly nineteen million words, and Fourth International, publishing continuously through 1950, appears not to have treated it as a subject at all.
Read this, then, as a book with a good deal more integrity in its body than in its front matter.
Denisov and Kondrashov assembled four hundred and forty fragments of Lenin, printed his most inconvenient article on language rights entire, let him call Communists Great-Russian chauvinists on the floor of a party congress, and let him demand every concession to Ukrainian in the Red Army's paperwork. Whatever the compilers privately thought, they put that material in front of Soviet and foreign linguists in 1983, and it is more useful now than most of what the house was publishing that year.
What they could not do was print the paragraph in which Lenin names who the chauvinist was, or the word Marr, or a name-index entry for Stalin, or a preface that did not end its account of Soviet language policy with the words without any coercive measures. The volume is not a forgery. It is an accurate anthology with four small holes in it, and every one of the four is in the same place.