The publishers' note to this volume is four lines long and tells you everything about its authority: "This translation has been made from the Russian text prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. CC CPSU." No author is named, because there is no author. This is the official life — two hundred thousand words, fourteen chapters, a name index of some three hundred entries, produced by the research institute attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and issued in English for the world. It represents the canonical Soviet Lenin in his most finished state: every sentence weighed, nothing left to accident.
The English printing is dated 1983, which places it in the brief Andropov interval between Brezhnev's death and the arrival of Gorbachev. The text is not an Andropov text. The copyright page carries no printing history, only the Soviet production code 014(01)-83, but the internal evidence dates the Russian original to the last Brezhnev year or two: the latest Party event it can cite is "the decisions of the 25th and 26th CPSU Congresses", the 26th having met in February and March 1981; the latest fact of any kind is that "367 translations of his works were made in various countries in 1981". Brezhnev is quoted twice, by name; Andropov does not occur, and neither does Gorbachev. This is a late-Brezhnev book in an Andropov-year jacket, and should be read as one.
Books like this are usually dismissed as hagiography and set aside. That is a mistake, and it is a mistake for a specific reason. This is not the 1938 Short Course. Stalin died thirty years before it was printed, the Twentieth Congress had happened, and the Institute was working under a set of constraints that had loosened in some places and tightened in others. The result is a document of unusual analytical value, because it is a book that must narrate the last two years of Lenin's life — 1922 to 1924 — in which Lenin's own writing turned against the apparatus that would canonise him. It cannot avoid those writings; by 1983 they were published in the Soviet Union and known everywhere. So it must handle them. Watching precisely how it handles them, sentence by sentence, is worth more than any denunciation.
Start with the hardest case, the "Letter to the Congress" — the Testament. It is here. The book gives it a section, calls it by name, describes its dictation in intimate detail from the journal of Lenin's duty secretaries, and quotes it: "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." It then goes further than a reader might expect, and prints the proposal itself — that the comrades "think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.". That is on the page, in 1983, in a book prepared by the Central Committee's own institute. Credit where it is due: the post-1956 admission held, and it held in the export edition.
Now look at what has been taken out of the middle. The second of those quotations, the proposal to remove Stalin, is the second sentence of the postscript Lenin dictated on 4 January 1923. The first sentence of that postscript is missing. In Trotsky's translation it runs: "Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary." In Lenin's text the removal follows from the rudeness — the proposal begins "Therefore". The premise has been cut and the conclusion kept, and the word "rude" does not appear anywhere in this book, of Stalin or of anyone else. The Institute has printed the remedy and deleted the diagnosis, so that Lenin appears to have worried vaguely about a concentration of authority rather than to have made a concrete charge about a man's character. And having removed the reason, the book supplies a resolution. At the Thirteenth Congress in May 1924, we are told, the letter was read to the delegations, and "Bearing in mind the important role of Stalin in repulsing the Trotskyite attacks on Leninism and his authority in the Party and trusting that he would take into account Lenin's critical remarks, the delegations expressed themselves in favour of Stalin retaining the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee." Lenin proposed; the Party, on mature reflection, declined. The dead man is overruled by a vote and the matter is closed.
The deletion is the more remarkable because Stalin himself did not attempt it. Pressed by the Opposition in 1927, he conceded the document from a public platform in Moscow, in a speech reprinted in International Press Correspondence on 17 November that year: "It is said that in the 'Testament' in question Lenin suggested to the party congress that it should deliberate on the question of replacing Stalin and appointing another comrade in his place as General Secretary of the party. This is perfectly true ... Yes, comrades, I am rude towards those who are rudely and disloyally destroying and disintegrating the party." The passage was reprinted, with the full text of the Testament, in The New International vol. II no. 1 (January 1935) — then still the magazine of the American Trotskyists, five years before the split that carried the title over to Max Shachtman. Stalin admitted the word from a platform and defended himself with it. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism, half a century later, took it out.
The book then does something stranger, and more revealing than it can have intended: it prints both halves of its own contradiction, in consecutive paragraphs, without noticing. First Krupskaya's minute of 18 May 1924, handing the notes over — "It was Vladimir Ilyich's express wish that these particular notes be submitted to the next Party Congress after his death." Then the Central Committee's decision of 21 May: "In accordance with Lenin's wish, the said documents shall be put before the Congress. They shall be read separately to the delegations with the provision that they are not to be reproduced." There it is — the mechanism of suppression, reproduced verbatim in the official biography as evidence of compliance. Lenin had asked that the notes be submitted to the Congress. They were read aloud, in separate rooms, and forbidden to be copied. The Institute quotes the order as though it were the fulfilment of the request, three lines after quoting the request.
Then there is Trotsky, and here the falsification is not an omission but an invention. "Lenin pointed to Trotsky's 'non-Bolshevism'," the book says, "mentioned his struggle against the Central Committee." Lenin's text says the opposite of what that sentence implies. What he wrote, in the same paragraph, was that "the October episode of Zinoviev and Kamenev was not, of course, accidental, but that it ought as little to be used against them as the non-Bolshevism of Trotsky" — he raises the non-Bolshevik past precisely in order to rule it out of court. And the Testament's actual verdict on Trotsky — "personally, he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee" — is nowhere in this volume. The judgement does not occur in any form.
What makes this worth dwelling on is that it is not a new trick, and that it had already been caught in print, in English, a generation earlier. Writing as Ernest Germain, Ernest Mandel devoted a two-part article, "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union", to the Khrushchev-era official history of 1959, in Fourth International — the journal of the International Secretariat — nos. 10 and 11. (The archive holds no issue dates for that run and none should be invented; marxists.org files the piece under 1962. The material below is all from no. 11.) His fourteenth question asks whether the new history re-establishes the truth about the Testament, and answers: "In the 1938 Short Course, Lenin's Testament is completely passed over in silence. In the new History, it is quoted on pages 387-8, but in a singularly mutilated and falsified way." He then itemises the method. It "suppresses Lenin's opinion that Trotsky is 'the most gifted' member of the Central Committee." And: "According to the History, Lenin warned the party against Trotsky's 'non-Bolshevism'; in reality Lenin wrote that Trotsky's non-Bolshevik past must not be brought up any more than the errors committed by Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of the October Revolution." That is an exact description of a book published twenty-odd years later. Mandel's closing observation applies unchanged: the omissions "are all the more grotesque in that the Testament has been published in the USSR and each reader can realize, by comparing the two texts," how far the editors have gone.
The Georgian affair is a different order of problem, because it has not been mutilated. It has been removed. Search this biography of two hundred thousand words for the word "Georgia" and you find it once, at the back, in the name-index entry for Mikhail Tskhakaya, a Georgian Bolshevik of the pre-revolutionary generation who has nothing to do with the events of 1922. "Georgian" does not occur at all. There is no Georgian affair. There is no Tiflis, no Mdivani, no Makharadze, no Dzerzhinsky commission, no striking of a Georgian communist in the face, no Lenin dictating that he had failed the workers of Russia by not intervening soon enough, no note offering Trotsky the case for the defence. Trotsky set out the alignment in December 1932, in "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin": the bureaucratic national policy "had already at that time provoked a keen opposition in Georgia, uniting against Stalin and his right hand man, Ordzhonikidze, the flower of Georgian Bolshevism", and Lenin "got into private contact with the leaders of the Georgian opposition (Mdivani, Makharadze, etc.) against the faction of Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky." Of those five names this book carries three. Dzerzhinsky appears twice, both times honourably. Ordzhonikidze — spelled "Orjonikidze" here, which is why a search on the usual English form returns a misleading nil — appears eleven times, all of them before 1918, arranging Lenin's escape to Finland and refusing to hand him over for trial; his index entry gives his dates as 1886–1937 and closes on "several responsible Party and government posts", leaving the reader to notice, if they can, that it stops in the worst year of the Terror and to supply their own explanation.
And yet the letter provoked by the affair is here, at length. "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation'" gets the better part of seven hundred words. Detached from the events that caused Lenin to dictate it, it becomes a meditation on fraternal friendship: the union must be maintained, centralism must be combined with republican sovereignty, equality must be factual and not merely formal. Great-Russian chauvinism is mentioned, but as a general danger, balanced in the next paragraph by "the danger of local nationalism, of national egoism" — which is exactly the equivalence Lenin wrote the letter to destroy. The section then closes with a sentence that should be read twice: "Acting on Lenin's instructions, the Communist Party has solved the national question in the best possible way." A document written in fury about the bullying of a small nation by a Russified apparatus has been converted into a testimonial for the apparatus. Nothing is falsified; a cause is simply amputated from its effect.
The same amputation is performed on Krupskaya, and more finely. The book records the evening of 15 December 1922 in detail, including the fact that "Krupskaya telephoned the Secretariat of the C.P.C. on Lenin's behalf and asked them to inform Stalin that Lenin would not be able to speak at the Congress of Soviets." It is her role as her husband's channel to the Secretariat in exactly these weeks that provoked what followed: Stalin's abuse of her down the telephone, her appeal to Kamenev, and Lenin's letter of 5 March 1923 demanding an apology on pain of breaking off relations. The Institute has the calls and the dictations and not one word of the sequel. It is not that the episode was unavailable to the Central Party Archives; it is that the book prints the first half of it and stops.
The fight over the foreign-trade monopoly survives, and it survives with a detail the Institute seems not to have registered. On 15 December 1922, we are told, Lenin dictated a letter to Stalin opposing delay on the monopoly, and "He also dictated a letter to Trotsky about Trotsky's speech in support of the foreign trade monopoly at the coming Plenary Meeting." That is the Lenin–Trotsky bloc, stated as a fact of the calendar, in the same chapter that explains that Trotsky spent these months in "opportunist, splitting activity". No connection is drawn. A reader who knows what happened in December 1922 will see the whole of it in that one sentence; a reader who does not will pass over it. "Better Fewer, But Better" is present too, and is put to work: it becomes a text about administrative economy, about "reducing our state apparatus to the utmost degree of economy", and its function is to explain why the Twelfth Congress merged the Central Control Commission with the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection — a body that within a few years would be an instrument for policing the Party rather than the bureaucracy.
Two further silences are worth naming because of where they fall. The Tenth Congress "took place between March 8 and 16, 1921", and the book describes its business fully: the tax in kind, the trade unions, the resolution on Party unity. The Kronstadt rising is not mentioned. The rebellion was being stormed across the ice in exactly those days, and delegates left the Congress hall to take part in the assault; here the crisis of early 1921 is rendered as crop failure, fuel shortage, war-weariness, and "Kulak revolts" that "broke out in various parts of the country". The book is not, in general, shy of Kronstadt: it narrates the rising there in July 1906 against the tsar, and records that "Both risings, however, were brutally crushed." It has the phrase. It simply does not use it in 1921. The ban on factions, by contrast, is not merely present but celebrated, and is explicitly detached from the emergency that produced it: "Lenin's resolution on Party unity is a most important historical document. As the directive which the Party and all its bodies have followed in preserving the unity of its ranks, it played a cardinal role in the subsequent struggle against all anti-Party groups." Lenin proposed the ban as a temporary measure in a desperate spring. The Institute records it as permanent doctrine, and correctly so, since that is what it became — including for the men named in the Testament.
That last sentence is not rhetoric, and the place to check it is the name index, which is where this book keeps the things its narrative will not say. Read the entries end to end and a shape appears. Zinoviev, 1883–1936, "expelled in 1934 for factional activities". Kamenev, 1883–1936, "expelled from the Party in 1934 for anti-Party activities". Pyatakov, 1890–1937, expelled 1936. Sokolnikov, 1888–1939, expelled 1936. Bukharin, 1888–1938, expelled 1937. Khristian Rakovsky, 1873–1941, expelled 1938. In every case the entry closes on an expulsion, and the dates close, one to three years later, on a death the entry does not explain. Alexander Shlyapnikov, who led the Workers' Opposition that this book condemns at length without naming a single member of it, is not even given an expulsion: he is "Chairman of the Central Committee of the All-Russia Metal-Workers' Union (1919–22)", and then 1937. The pattern is not the removal of names. The names are there, some of them warmly. Rakovsky — a Balkan socialist who opposed the war from Romania, later head of the Soviet Ukrainian government and Soviet ambassador in London and Paris, and after that a leader of the Left Opposition — appears in the narrative among the internationalists who resisted the collapse of the Second International, as "Kh. Rakovski in Rumania". The index knows him under the other transliteration, and knows that he died in 1941; he was shot that September. What has been removed is the ending, and a reader can reconstruct it only by noticing that they all stop between 1936 and 1941, and that a book which knows their dates to the year cannot say what the year means. Stalin's own entry says it obliquely and once, in a formula worth preserving as a specimen: he "played a prominent part in building socialism in the USSR, combating Trotskyists and right opportunists, and facilitating Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45); at the same time committed theoretical and political errors and gross violation of socialist laws". "Gross violation of socialist laws" is where the Terror lives in this volume: in an alphabetical list, at the back, in the passive voice.
Something similar governs October. The Revolutionary Military Committee — the body that actually executed the insurrection — is named eight times: its creation by the Petrograd Soviet on 16 October, its continuous session on the second floor at Smolny, the workers placing themselves at its disposal, and its founding proclamation, quoted in full, announcing that "State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies—the Revolutionary Military Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison." A member of it, K. A. Mekhonoshin, is quoted from his memoirs. The one thing never stated is who chaired it — and this is not squeamishness about chairmanships in general, since Zinoviev is later introduced without embarrassment as "Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet". The office is simply left vacant, and the space filled from Mekhonoshin, who supplies a commander: "Comrade Lenin was the true commander-in-chief of all the armed forces of the October revolution... Lenin can boldly be called our first Red marshal." It is fair to record, though, that a cruder falsification has been dropped. The Short Course of 1938 claimed a "Party Centre" headed by Stalin had directed the insurrection — the legend Trotsky demolished in The Stalin School of Falsification, in the "Letter to the Bureau of Party History" that is chapter 4, by the simple observation that "Neither was Lenin a member of that committee." This book quotes the 16 October resolution calling for "support of the centre set up by the Central Committee for this purpose", and then says nothing about who was on it. The legend has been abandoned; the quotation is left standing with nobody in it.
A word is needed about the book's vocabulary, because it is conspicuous and because the obvious inference from it is wrong. Opportunism and its cognates occur 202 times here, about ten per ten thousand words against an average of 1.55 across the 195 Progress volumes in this catalogue — the third densest use in the collection. That figure proves nothing. Part of it is simply the subject: Lenin used the word constantly and meant something definite by it, and a life of Lenin inherits the usage. The rest is disposed of by measurement. The Fourth International's own Tenth World Congress documents, printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 12 no. 46, 23 December 1974, use the same family of words at 1.69 per ten thousand. On frequency the two traditions are indistinguishable, and nobody is entitled to convict anybody of ritualism by counting.
What can be tested is whether the charge is attached to an act that could be shown not to have happened, and whether the category could ever be turned on the speaker. On the first, this book divides at 1917. Before it, the usage is as concrete as anyone could ask. The collapse of the Second International is dated, costed and peopled: "On August 4, 1914, acting in contravention to the will of the International, the Social-Democratic group in Germany voted with the bourgeois-landowner majority in the Reichstag in favour of giving the Kaiser government war credits amounting to 5,000 million marks", after which Südekum, Scheidemann, Haase, Legien and Kautsky are named for it. The counter-example is given too — "Liebknecht, Lenin said, had set an example to all internationalists by voting in the Reichstag against war credits" — and so are the Serbian deputies who voted against. Every element of that is checkable, and any of it could be refuted by producing the division lists. After 1917 the same word stops doing that work. Trotsky's index entry calls him "ideologist and leader of the opportunist trend in the RSDLP": no act, no date, no organisation, nothing that could be false. This is where the book's other habit becomes relevant. The name "Trotsky" occurs sixty-one times, and he is in the wrong on every one of them; "Trotskyism", "Trotskyite" and "Trotskyist" account for twenty-one more, so that the man and the category are almost equally present. His slogans and positions are quoted repeatedly, in quotation marks — and the footnotes reference no work by Trotsky at all — not one, in two hundred thousand words with several hundred citations to Lenin, to memoirs, to Party resolutions and to Marx. An opponent who is cited can be checked; an opponent who is only characterised cannot.
On the second question the answer is not peculiar to this volume. Across the whole Progress catalogue, ninety passages place the word within a line or two of "our Party" or "the CPSU", and in every one the Party is combating opportunism, never accused of it. The distinction this book maintains is precise, and worth stating exactly, because it is not a simple refusal to admit fault: individual leaders are recorded as wrong — Zinoviev and Kamenev in October, Stalin and Sverdlov voting against Lenin a fortnight later, the Party's practical workers underrating the co-operatives — but the category is never available for use against the Party, or against anyone who stayed inside it. Error is admitted; opportunism is what other people have. The nearest thing to an exception is a sentence about 1918 in which the counter-revolution hopes to undermine Soviet power "by using the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks and also opportunist elements in the Bolshevik Party itself" — where the Party is a body being infiltrated, not an agent that could be wrong. And the honest thing to record here is that the essentialising move is not the Institute's invention. The book quotes Lenin himself: "The whole struggle of our Party (and of the working-class movement in Europe generally)," he wrote, "must be directed against opportunism. The latter is not a current of opinion, not a tendency; it (opportunism) has now become the organised tool of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement." (The scan prints "workingclass"; the hyphen is restored, and nothing else in these quotations is altered.) That is a definition designed to make argument unnecessary, and Lenin wrote it. What Lenin also did, constantly, was name the vote, the man and the date. The Institute kept the definition and dropped the practice.
None of which should send the reader away. This book contains a great deal of real work, and the honest thing is to say where.
Some of the honesty is in exactly the places one would expect it to fail. On Brest-Litovsk, where three other volumes in this series confuse Trotsky's position with Bukharin's, this book gets it right: the Left Communists "called for a 'revolutionary war' against Germany", Trotsky "suggested declaring the war over, demobilising the army, but not signing any peace treaty", and the January vote is given as thirty-two for revolutionary war, sixteen for Trotsky's position — named in the text as "neither peace nor war" — and fifteen for signing. Condemned, but described accurately. More striking still, the book records that when Lenin demanded the expulsion of Zinoviev and Kamenev in October 1917, "Most of the Central Committee members (Stalin, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov and others) who were present did not support Lenin's proposal." Stalin is named, in the Institute's own voice, on the wrong side of a vote against Lenin. Where the same admission is not made is March 1917: the opposition to the April Theses inside the Bolshevik Party has been removed entirely, its named opponents here are Plekhanov, Dan and Tsereteli, all of them outside, and we are told that "Lenin's position quickly won over leading Party workers and Party organisations." The Institute's own International Working-Class Movement, volume 3, published in the same year by the same body, concedes that Kamenev's March line was deeply erroneous and that Stalin's was mistaken. This book does not mention that there was a March line.
The early chapters are the best of it. The account of the Ulyanov family draws on genuine archival recovery and says so: "Recently discovered documents contain important information about V. I. Lenin's grandfather. N. V. Ulyanov. He came from a family of serf peasants in the Nizhegorodskaya gubernia and was himself a serf." That is a finding, and it is presented as one. The long emigration — 1900 to 1917, the years most Western biographies compress — is here reconstructed at a level of detail that remains hard to find in English anywhere else: the rooms in Secheron, the Richters in a house near the British Museum, the reading rooms in Berlin and Geneva and Copenhagen, the Party school at Longjumeau in the spring of 1911 and what became of its students, the arrest at Poronin and the cart back through the Galician villages. Whatever one thinks of the Institute's politics, its access to the Central Party Archives was real, and much of the chronology, the correspondence and the domestic texture in these chapters is sound and is not available in this fullness elsewhere.
The same is true of the final chapter's clinical narrative. The journal of Lenin's duty secretaries from November 1922 to March 1923 is quoted extensively and to powerful effect — Volodicheva noting that he "dictated quickly, but was obviously ill", and asked her what day it was; the doctors' resolution that he might dictate five to ten minutes daily, that "Visitors are forbidden", and that "neither his friends nor members of his family should tell Vladimir Ilyich any political news". That last instruction is quoted approvingly, as evidence of care. It is also the most sinister sentence in the book, and the Institute prints it without appearing to see why.
And the volume supplies, in good faith, the material for its own indictment. It records Lenin telling a few leading comrades in September 1918: "I note with deep dissatisfaction that my person is being glorified. This is annoying and harmful. All of us know that personalities have nothing to do with it." It records him forbidding a Lenin Museum in 1920 — "You can't imagine how unpleasant I find the constant promotion of my personality" — and asking a cameraman to "Take fewer pictures of me and more of those who are going to listen to me". A reader who has these passages and also has the preface, with its "guiding star to the working folk of all lands", does not need to be told what happened between 1920 and 1983.
For the reply, the archives are rich and specific, and much of it is Lenin's own generation answering in its own time. The Testament was printed complete, in English, in The New International vol. II no. 1 (January 1935), with the note that the leadership had refused by thirty votes to ten to have it read to the Thirteenth Congress. Trotsky's "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" (December 1932) is the fullest account of both the document and the Georgian crisis behind it, and his speech to the Twelfth Congress of April 1923, later printed as "Lenin's Struggle Against Bureaucracy" in the International Socialist Review vol. 26 no. 4 (whole no. 173, Fall 1965), is the contemporaneous argument itself. On the falsification of party history the standing text is The Stalin School of Falsification (1937). Mandel's "Thirty Questions" in Fourth International nos. 10 and 11 is the indispensable guide to reading books of this kind, and remains a working manual. His "Lenin's Heritage" in Intercontinental Press (vol. 8, no. 15, 20 April 1970) states the case in a sentence: "Lenin's last struggle was a desperate attempt to stop this perversion of his doctrine." On the Georgian affair, an editorial note in Inprecor No. 20 (27 February 1975) corrects a misdescription in circulation at the time and puts the alignment plainly: "Boudou Mdivani was a Georgian Bolshevik with whom Lenin and Trotsky made a bloc against the brutal national policies of Stalin and Ordjonikidze." Four years after this biography appeared, when Gorbachev's speech of 2 November 1987 reworked the Testament again, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International answered it in International Viewpoint No. 130 (November 1987) under the heading "Stalin's school of falsification", noting that it is Stalin "whom the Testament proposed should be removed from his post of general secretary", and that the speech "passes over the Testament's main judgement on Trotsky". That statement identifies Trotsky in its first line as "chair of its Revolutionary Military Committee" — the office this book leaves empty. For the scholarship, Daniel Bensaïd's "In defence of Communism" in International Viewpoint No. 307 (January 1999) points where a reader of this volume should go next: to Lenin's "Last Testament" and the "Journal of Lenin's Secretaries" as read by Moshe Lewin in Lenin's Last Struggle — the same documents the Institute quotes here, read by someone under no obligation to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Read this book, then, for what it knows and for what it cannot say. Its Lenin is a man of iron will, boundless modesty and unfailing correctness, whose final six weeks of dictation produced "a single work setting forth in general outline the programme of the socialist transformation of Russia". The actual Lenin of those weeks was a partly paralysed man, forbidden political news by his doctors and stripped of allies, trying at five minutes a day to warn a Party that he had made against the man he had promoted, over a question — the crushing of a small nation by Russian officials — that he had come to think dishonoured everything he had done. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism possessed every document required to tell that story. It had them in its own archive, and it quotes from them on these pages. What it produced instead is the most polished monument ever built to a man who asked, twice and in writing, not to be monumentalised.