This is a book almost entirely made of fragments, and it says so. Of the ninety-odd items in it, eighty-nine begin with the word From. The five that do not are two government decrees, two letters and one brief report of a speech. There is not a single complete article, pamphlet or address by Lenin between these covers. The foreword ends by telling you as much, in a sentence so flat that it reads as housekeeping: "This collection contains excerpts from Lenin's fundamental works, articles, speeches and reports, arranged in chronological order and supplemented with notes and a name-index."
So the question this volume poses is not the usual one. Nothing here has been rewritten; there is no evidence anywhere in these 63,000 words of a Lenin sentence doctored or a Lenin argument inverted. The Publishers' Note states plainly that "The translations are taken from the English edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works prepared by Progress Publishers, Moscow, except otherwise indicated," and where the sources can be checked against the Collected Works they check out. The question is what the scissors did — which sentence each excerpt begins at, which one it stops before, and what the compilers' own apparatus says about the men in it. On that evidence the volume turns out to be both more honest and more damning than a reader expecting simple censorship will predict.
First, the date, since the spine can mislead in this series. The copyright page reads "First printing 1983 / © Progress Publishers, 1983", with the imprint code 014(01)-83; the Russian title is Ob intelligentsii. The foreword carries its own line, "English translation © Progress Publishers, 1982". So this is a genuine early-1980s book and not a reprint of an older one — but its doctrinal furniture is late-Brezhnev, not Andropov. The latest source cited anywhere in it is The CPSU in Resolutions, vol. 3, Moscow 1970. The latest Party congress named is the Fourteenth, of 1925. The governing formula is "developed socialism", the phrase the Twenty-Seventh Congress would retire in 1986, and the constitutional warrant is Article 19 of the 1977 Constitution, quoted in the foreword: "The social basis of the U.S.S.R. is the unbreakable alliance of the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia." Brezhnev is not named; neither is Andropov, nor Khrushchev, nor — in a Soviet book of 1983 about the intelligentsia — Stalin. The manuscript belongs to the years before the succession, and nothing in it registers that the succession had happened.
Two other things are unusual enough to note. The volume names its compilers on the title page — S. A. Fedyukin, D. Sc. (Hist.), and I. K. Eldarova — where most Progress anthologies hide behind an institute. And its Part II covers a subject the Soviet historical profession had, by 1983, spent thirty years working on seriously: the fate of the old specialists after October. That is a real field with real scholars in it, and the selection shows the hand of someone who knew it.
Take the credits first, because they are substantial and because the criticism that follows depends on them.
The volume prints, at full length and without softening, Lenin's letter to Maxim Gorky of 15 September 1919 — the harshest thing he ever wrote about intellectuals, and the passage every Western anthology reaches for. Gorky had protested at the arrests of Petrograd professors. Lenin's reply is here entire, including the sentence: the intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing "in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its henchmen, the intellectual lackeys of capital, who imagine they are the brains of the nation. Actually, they are not the brains, but sh-." (The euphemism is not the compilers'. It is the Collected Works translator's, in vol. 44, p. 285, which is the source they cite and reproduce.) They print the taunt about Korolenko, the jeer at "the whining of rotting intellectuals", and Lenin's advice to Gorky to get out of that company before he goes under. A volume produced to demonstrate the Party's solicitude for the intelligentsia opens its 1919 section by printing the document that most embarrasses the claim. That is not what a crude propaganda operation does.
Second, and more important, the volume shows Lenin changing his mind, which is precisely the test an anthology on this subject exists to pass. On page 34 it prints the founding passage of What Is To Be Done? — "We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without" — accurately and at length, including the acknowledgement that "the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia." Thirty-five pages later it prints Lenin at the Third Congress of the RSDLP, on 20 April (3 May) 1905, arguing the other way: "It has been said here that the exponents of Social-Democratic ideas have been mainly intellectuals. That is not so. During the period of Economism the exponents of revolutionary ideas were workers, not intellectuals... In my writings for the press I have long urged that as many workers as possible should be placed on the committees. ... I should be strongly in favour of having eight workers to every two intellectuals on our committees." Three years separate the two. The compilers print both, in order, without commentary. A reader who wanted to argue that Lenin's 1902 formula was a polemical over-correction rather than a permanent doctrine will find the evidence for it in this book, supplied by the Institute that is supposed to be suppressing it.
Third, and best, the volume prints in full the most self-critical page Lenin ever wrote on this subject. In The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (April 1918) he defends paying bourgeois experts very large salaries, and then refuses to dress it up:
Clearly, this measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of every proletarian power, which call for the reduction of all salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker... it is also a step backward on the part of our socialist Soviet state power, which from the very outset proclaimed and pursued the policy of reducing high salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker.
And then the sentence that ought to be printed on the flyleaf of every book in this series:
To conceal from the people the fact that the enlistment of bourgeois experts by means of extremely high salaries is a retreat from the principles of the Paris Commune would be sinking to the level of bourgeois politicians and deceiving the people.
The compilers printed that. They then produced a book whose apparatus does the opposite.
Because that is where the operation lives: not in the Lenin, but in the cuts and in the notes.
Consider "Party Organisation and Party Literature" (November 1905), the one Lenin text most often cited in the West as the charter of Soviet control over writers. It occupies six pages of Collected Works vol. 10, pp. 44–49. This volume prints from p. 48. What that page contains is the attack on the hypocrisy of bourgeois freedom of the press: "Are you free in relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer, in relation to your bourgeois public, which demands that you provide it with pornography in frames and paintings, and prostitution as a 'supplement' to 'sacred' scenic art?" What the earlier pages contain is the argument the article is actually about — and it is missing in both directions. The phrase "a cog and a screw", by which Lenin described what party literature must become, does not occur anywhere in this book; nor does "Down with non-partisan writers!"; nor does the qualification that immediately follows them, that "literature is least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling" and that "in this field greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content."
That is worth pausing on, because it is not the cut a propagandist would make. A whitewash would drop the cog and keep the fantasy. A hard-line volume would keep the cog. This volume keeps neither. What survives the excision is the part of the essay aimed outward, at the bourgeois press; what is excised is the whole of the difficult internal argument, in which Lenin was trying to say two things at once and knew it. The casualty is the same one the Institute's other Lenin anthologies produce: not Lenin the polemicist, who is preserved intact, but Lenin the man working something out. Across the volume the ellipsis appears 166 times.
Now the silence, which is the sharpest thing in the book, and which has to be stated exactly.
The volume runs chronologically to the end of Lenin's working life. Its 1922 items are dated 18 March, 27 March and 28 March; then nothing until 13 November; then 27 and 29 December. In the eight-month hole sits the episode that any serious account of Lenin and the intelligentsia has to reckon with: the deportations. In August 1922 some two hundred philosophers, historians, economists, agronomists and writers were arrested and expelled from Soviet Russia, most of them sailing from Petrograd that autumn on the two German steamers that gave the affair its name.
Part of the gap has an innocent explanation and it must be given. Lenin suffered his first stroke on 25–26 May 1922 and did not return to work until October. He was not at his desk when the arrests were made. But the policy was set in motion before the stroke, in a document that is in the very edition this volume takes its texts from: Lenin's letter to F. E. Dzerzhinsky of 19 May 1922, headed "On the question of deporting the writers and professors helping the counter-revolution", printed in Collected Works vol. 45, pp. 555–56 — a Progress volume of 1976, seven years before this one. Lenin's instruction there is not that the deportations be reconsidered but that they be better prepared: "This needs more thorough preparation. Without it we shall make mistakes." He asks that Politburo members be put on the duty of reading the periodicals for candidates.
The compilers cite twenty-eight volumes of the Collected Works between vol. 1 and vol. 36, and they reach outside that run to vol. 44 for the Gorky letter. They do not cite vol. 45 once. This is therefore not an availability problem; it is a selection. And the shape of what remains makes it legible. In this whole book the name Dzerzhinsky occurs exactly once, in the editorial footnote attached to the Gorky letter, recording that on 11 September 1919 the Politburo "directed F. E. Dzerzhinsky, N. I. Bukharin and L. B. Kamenev to have their cases reconsidered" — Dzerzhinsky appearing solely as an instrument of clemency towards arrested intellectuals. The Cheka is never named. Nor is the GPU. Nor Glavlit, the censorship established in June 1922, in a book that prints Lenin on the press.
I want to be careful about what this does and does not prove. Lenin's polemical ferocity is not concealed here; the Gorky letter alone disproves that, and the compilers also print him telling the Mensheviks and SRs in 1919 that if they incite strikes they may "go to Georgia, go to Kolchak, or else you will go to prison. ... And that is what we shall do with them." The volume is not squeamish about repression in general. What it will not do is put its subject — the intelligentsia — and the specific act of 1922 in the same sentence. The one document from the gap that is squarely on the volume's own theme, and that Lenin wrote in full possession of his faculties, is the one that is not here.
The Name Index is where the compilers speak in their own voice, and it repays reading.
Lenin's 1909 article on Vekhi is generously excerpted, and it names the collection's authors: "Berdayev, Bulgakov, Herschensohn, Kistyakovsky, Struve, Frank and Izgoyev". Four of those seven — Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank and Izgoyev — were put out of Russia in 1922. The index gives each of them a dated entry. Berdyaev, "Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874–1948) — Russian idealist philosopher, mystic, Cadet". Bulgakov, "(1871–1944) — Russian economist, idealist philosopher, 'legal Marxist'". Frank, "(1877–1950) — Russian idealist philosopher and mystic". Izgoyev, "(b. 1872) — Russian writer, an ideologue of the Constitutional-Democratic Party". Three of the four have death years that fall abroad — Berdyaev at Clamart outside Paris, Bulgakov in Paris, Frank in London — and the compilers, who had to look those years up in order to print them, supply not one word about how any of these men came to be outside Russia. For Izgoyev, who died in Estonia in 1935, there is no death year at all.
Set beside that, one small item earlier in the same volume becomes very loud. In 1921 the Swedish Red Cross offered to take Academician Pavlov to Sweden to continue his work. The volume prints Lenin's reply in full: the Soviet government "finds itself obliged to turn down the request", because "The Soviet Republic has now entered a period of intensive economic development requiring the exertion of all the country's spiritual and creative forces." Two pages earlier it prints the Council of People's Commissars' decree of 24 January 1921 giving Pavlov a de luxe edition of his life's work, the property rights in it "in Russia and abroad", a double academic ration for himself and his wife, and their flat for life. That is the policy of 1921 towards a scientist who wanted to leave: he may not go, and he will be kept in comfort. The policy of 1922 towards philosophers who did not want to leave is not in the book.
The same instrument does something worse two pages earlier. Bukharin and Kamenev appear in this book only once each, at p. 227, inside Lenin's letter to Gorky, as the two men the Central Committee appointed "to check on the arrests of bourgeois intellectuals of the near-Cadet type and to release whoever possible". They are in this volume, in other words, exclusively as agents of mercy towards the intelligentsia. Their index entries read: Kamenev, "(1883–1936)... for his anti-Party activity was expelled from the Party"; Bukharin, "(1888–1938)... in 1937 for his anti-Party activity was expelled from the Party". Both men were shot — Kamenev in August 1936 after the first Moscow trial, Bukharin in March 1938 after the third. The index prints the year of each death as a bare parenthesis and names the event that preceded it as an expulsion. That is not selection. It is a false statement of the record, in the compilers' own words, about the only two Bolsheviks the book shows doing the thing the book exists to praise.
Trotsky's entry is the third of the pattern: he is described as having "preached the impossibility of socialism being victorious in the USSR" — a doctrine he never held and which is nowhere quoted — and as "deported from the USSR" in 1929. Deported is the only appearance of the word in the volume. It is applied to the man the book quotes Lenin calling "Comrade Trotsky", and withheld from the two hundred.
This is the discriminator worth carrying away, and it is not about vocabulary. Error is admissible in these books. The volume freely records Bolsheviks being wrong: it prints Lenin conceding a retreat from the Paris Commune, prints him admitting that arrests of intellectuals produced "mistakes here, too", prints his complaint that the Party's own new members are "inexperienced and ignorant in matters of state administration". What never happens is that the classification turns inward. Nobody who stayed on the inside is ever put in the category the book reserves for the outside — and where the biography of an insider would require the category, the biography is falsified instead.
There was an answer, and it was written before the questions were asked.
On the pre-revolutionary argument — the substance of Part I — the best contemporaneous reply is Trotsky's "The Intelligentsia and Socialism", written in 1910, in the middle of the years the volume anthologises. It is not a polemic against Lenin; it is a review of Max Adler that reaches a harder conclusion than either man's slogans. Trotsky argues that the intellectual's dependence is not merely economic but occupational — that a doctor or a lawyer must "find music in his soul and in his voice which will accord with the feelings and habits" of the clients who pay him, whereas "Though it enslaves the muscles and exhausts the body, factory work is powerless to subject to itself the worker's mind." From that he draws the pessimistic conclusion that "it is harder to win the intelligentsia today than it was yesterday, and that it will be harder tomorrow than it is today" — and then the conclusion that this book's whole Part II is a commentary on: that the intelligentsia will come over not before the transfer of power but after it, when confronted with "the inescapable fact of the transfer of the entire apparatus of society into new hands", and able to see that the new conditions "will open before them unlimited possibilities for the application of technical, organizational and scientific forces". That is, in 1910, an accurate forecast of the specialists policy of 1918–21 which this volume documents. It was written by the man its index calls an anti-Soviet deportee, and quoted approvingly by nobody in it.
On the post-revolutionary argument, the volume itself supplies the opening. It prints Lenin at the Eleventh Congress in March 1922 on the Smena Vekh émigrés, quoting Ustryalov at length and saying, in a passage that does the compilers credit: "I think that by being straightforward like this, Ustryalov is rendering us a great service." What the volume closes at 1923 cannot show is how the wager came out. Trotsky, addressing the Central Control Commission in 1927, read Ustryalov's later verdict into the record — Ustryalov calling for "a new impulse... a Neo-Nep", warning the Politburo against any compromise with the Opposition, and concluding: "That is why we are now ... definitely in favor of Stalin." Trotsky's point was that the class the Ustryalovs spoke for had made its choice, and that it had not chosen the Opposition. That exchange is reprinted in The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), ch. 9.
And on the foreword's final claim — that there has "taken final shape an alliance of the working classes and the intelligentsia", warranted by Article 19 — the answer is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which examined the identical formula in the identical place, the Stalin Constitution that Article 19 inherits. Trotsky's objection was not that the intelligentsia had failed to be integrated but that the category was doing concealment work: the official admission of a surviving difference between mental and physical labour, he wrote, "has the advantage that it permits a concealment of the income of the bureaucracy under the honorable title of 'intellectual' labor" (ch. 9). And against the tripartite constitutional formula itself: "The Soviet proletariat still exists as a class deeply distinct from the peasantry, the technical intelligentsia and the bureaucracy" (ch. 10). Nearly half a century later, Article 19 makes three of those four and drops the one Trotsky named.
Read this volume, then, for what it genuinely contains, which is a great deal. It is the fullest single collection in English of Lenin on a question he returned to for nearly thirty years and did not settle: whether socialist consciousness comes to the workers from outside them, and what a workers' state owes to the educated men it inherits and cannot replace. It prints the 1902 answer and the 1905 correction; it prints the fury of 1919 and the decree of 1921 that gave Academician Pavlov his rations; it prints Lenin insisting that a retreat be called a retreat. It ends, deliberately, on the gentlest note available — the January 1923 diary page in which he says the schoolteacher "should be raised to a standard he has never achieved, and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society".
What it will not print is the letter of 19 May 1922 in the same edition's own volume 45; and what its index cannot bring itself to write, next to three dates of death in Paris and London, is the word deported, which it spends without hesitation on Trotsky. Lenin's rule, printed in this book in the excerpt from The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, is that concealing a retreat from the people is "deceiving the people". The compilers reproduced the rule and, in their apparatus, broke it. That is the reason this edition needs an introduction, and it is also the reason it is worth reprinting: the evidence against the apparatus is in the book, put there by the apparatus.