The third of the seven volumes is the longest book in this series — some 296,000 words — and it covers twelve years: from the Russian revolution of 1905 to the February revolution of 1917, stopping deliberately a few weeks short of Lenin's return to the Finland Station. It is the work of about forty named historians of the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, with an editorial board of five under S. S. Khromov, statistics prepared by a team of four, and above them substantially the same General Editorial Committee that signed Volume One: B. N. Ponomarev as chairman, T. T. Timofeyev and A. I. Sobolev as his deputies, with P. N. Fedoseyev and V. V. Zagladin among its twenty members. Ponomarev writes no introduction here. He does not need to. His introduction to Volume One is cited in this volume's own first footnote, and the commission it set out there — a history "interpreting the past in the interest of the present and future", in Ponomarev's words in Volume One — governs everything that follows.
Get the date right before anything else. The spine says 1983; the copyright page carries a Russian line, mangled in the scan, for Izdatelstvo "Mysl", 1978, and beneath it the English translation copyright, Progress Publishers 1983. The internal evidence agrees with the Russian date exactly. The most recent datable source the book cites is Brezhnev's Our Course: Peace and Socialism (Novosti, 1978), quoted twice; before that, the CPSU Central Committee resolution on the seventieth anniversary of 1905, in Kommunist No. 2 for 1975. There is one bibliographic imprint reading 1984, in a footnote to a Rütten und Loening volume on the impact of 1905 on Germany; the same line prints "DeutsMand" for Deutschland, and the year is scanner damage, not evidence. (I could not establish which digit it corrupts.) A handful of Lenin references carry 1980 Progress printings — those belong to the English apparatus, not to the text. So: a Russian book finished in 1978, at the last confident moment of détente, reaching English readers in 1983, the year of the Euromissile deployments and the shooting down of KAL 007. The book knows nothing of that, and it is fairer to it to say so than to pretend otherwise.
Now the thing that makes this volume unlike any other book in the catalogue.
The word opportunism and its cognates occur 383 times here — 12.9 times per 10,000 words. Across the 195 Progress titles in this collection the pooled rate is 1.55, the median 0.17, and 76 of the books never use the word at all. Volume Three is the densest user in the entire catalogue, just ahead of The World Communist Movement (1973) and well clear of the 1939 History of the CPSU(B). Around it sit reformism (246), centrism (126), revisionism (119) and conciliators (60): roughly one term of political disqualification every three hundred words, for some seven hundred pages. The book's own jacket copy names the genre — it promises "an account of their fight against the opportunists" — and its master binary appears as a fixed phrase, "revolutionary and opportunist", thirty-five times, once as a chapter title.
The gradient within this series is the striking part, because the publisher, the institute and the editorial committee are held constant:
| volume | period | words | opportunis- | per 10,000 | Trotsky |
| 1 (1980) | to 1870 | 292,294 | 42 | 1.44 | 3 |
| 2 (1981) | 1871–1904 | 273,262 | 199 | 7.28 | 6 |
| 3 (1983) | 1905–1917 | 296,581 | 383 | 12.91 | 29 |
The vocabulary of deviation multiplies ninefold as the narrative approaches the split that produced the state which commissioned the book.
The honest objection has to be put first, because it is a strong one. Much of that rise is simply the subject. Between 1905 and 1917 the argument about revisionism, reformism and the collapse of 4 August 1914 was the content of the international movement's history, and Lenin, whom this book quotes on almost every page, used the word constantly. A historian of those years who did not use it often would be writing badly. The frequency alone proves nothing, and a companion study in this project which tried to argue from frequency to ritual has since retracted that step, on the good ground that Lenin scores no better on the same measure than the Progress volumes do.
So the test has to be finer. Not how often the word is used, but what it is used instead of — and whether the book has a different vocabulary available when it wants one.
It does, and it uses it constantly. Rosa Luxemburg is told, in the chapter on the national question, that she and others "were inclined to underestimate the nations' right to self-determination as a principle in the programmes of the proletarian parties of oppressor nations"; her argument is then stated fairly, in three clauses, and answered. Radek is said to have opposed the proletariat's revolutionary struggle to the struggle for self-determination; Pyatakov, Bosh and Bukharin are charged with "imperialist economism" and with holding "erroneous, primitive ideas"; Bukharin's Imperialism and the World Economy is nonetheless cited three times, always through Lenin's approving preface. In March 1917, the book says, "Pravda published deeply erroneous articles by L. B. Kamenev which expressed his personal views". And — this is genuinely notable in a Soviet volume of 1978 — "Stalin also advanced a view in Pravda which was mistaken and hampered the revolutionary education of the masses."
Mistaken. Erroneous. Inclined to underestimate. Failed to see. The book has a precise and serviceable language for a comrade's error, and it applies that language to Luxemburg, to Radek, to Bukharin, to Kamenev and to Stalin himself.
Trotsky gets none of it. His position on the character of the Russian revolution is "a clearly adventurist action plan"; his "impressive-sounding but empty 'ultra-revolutionary' phrases actually led to adventurism and impotent outbursts"; "Trotsky's course was typical of centrism in Russia"; and the verdict, in the volume's opening chapter:
The Bolsheviks resolutely came out against Trotsky's eclectic concept, exposing it as a dangerous variety of opportunism.
The label is not tracking the content of the error. Luxemburg's disagreement with Lenin over self-determination was at least as wide as Trotsky's over the peasantry, and she is inside the family. The label tracks membership: it marks the line of descent from which the CPSU of 1978 claimed to come, and the one person placed outside it. That is what the word is doing in this book that an argument would otherwise have to do.
The paragraph that condemns Trotsky's theory does so in these terms:
Marx's idea of uninterrupted revolution was grossly distorted by Trotsky, who set forth a clearly adventurist action plan. According to it, Russia's only revolutionary force was the proletariat, which was capable of immediately forming a government of "labour democracy" and of beginning to restructure the country on socialist lines ("without the tsar, and with a labour government").
Note the quotation marks. They contain a doctrine, and they are sourced to nothing. The only references anywhere near the passage are to Lenin — Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution and "The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution". This is not an accident of one page. In a book that cites Luxemburg's Gesammelte Werke sixteen times, Kautsky's own writings nine times, the revisionists' Sozialistische Monatshefte fourteen times and Die Neue Zeit twenty-four times, that opens the proceedings of the Stuttgart congress and the protocols of the Jena party congress — a book whose notes say "Collected Works" 558 times — no work by Trotsky is cited once. The name appears in the index at twelve pages; it never appears in a footnote except inside the title of an article by Lenin.
Readers of the companion introductions in this series will recognise the shape. Two foreign-policy volumes were found to derive the doctrine of peaceful coexistence from Lenin across nearly two hundred thousand words without the phrase ever once appearing inside a quotation from him; the pedigree was asserted in the author's voice. Here the same move runs in reverse: a doctrine is put inside quotation marks, attributed to a named man, and never taken from anything he wrote.
It also gets the attribution wrong, and the error is checkable. The phrases in those brackets are Parvus's, not Trotsky's. Parvus wrote the introduction to Trotsky's 1905 pamphlet, and the formula about a workers' government without a tsar is his. Trotsky spent much of his later life distinguishing his own position from it. In "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution" (Summer 1939) he sets out exactly where they parted: Parvus, he writes, foresaw not the growing over of the democratic into the socialist revolution but merely "a regime of workers' democracy of the Australian type, where on the basis of a farmers' system there arose for the first time a labor government which did not go beyond the framework of a bourgeois regime." And then, flatly: "This conclusion was not shared by me." The theory, he adds in the same passage, "has usually been linked with the names of 'Parvus and Trotsky.' This was only partially correct." An Academy of Sciences volume of 1978 puts Parvus's formulation inside quotation marks in Trotsky's mouth, and builds the charge of denying the peasantry on top of it.
That charge is the other half, and it is answerable from the text the book will not name. "Permanent revolution" appears exactly once in 296,000 words, in scare quotes, inside a subordinate clause of the sentence that condemns it — "for all its outward 'leftism' and formal references to the Marxist idea of uninterrupted ('permanent') revolution". The theory is never stated. Chapter V of Results and Prospects, written in 1906 and titled "The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry", is about nothing else. Of representatives of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie in a revolutionary government it says: "They can and should be in the government: a sound policy will compel the proletariat to call to power the influential leaders of the urban petty-bourgeoisie, of the intellectuals and of the peasantry." "The proletariat in power will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it." "Nothing remains for the peasantry to do but to rally to the regime of workers' democracy." And when Trotsky reduced the theory to twelve numbered propositions in 1930, the third reads: "Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed."
One may think all of that wrong — that the peasantry would not in fact rally, that the formula collapses the distinction it claims to preserve. Lenin thought a version of it wrong for a decade and said so in print. But "Trotsky thereby denied the revolutionary role of the peasantry" is not an answer to those sentences; it is a statement that they were never read. The same holds for the charge of "skipping" stages. The Permanent Revolution devotes a short chapter to it, and its argument is not that stages may be skipped at will but the opposite: "Every attempt to skip over real, that is, objectively conditioned stages in the development of the masses, is political adventurism." The word the book uses against him is the word he uses in his own defence.
The first Soviet in history gets a full and rather good page. The book reports that 562 deputies were elected to the St. Petersburg Soviet from 147 factories, 34 workshops and 16 trade unions, that it represented no fewer than 250,000 workers, that 351 deputies were metalworkers and 65 per cent were members of the RSDLP. It tells you that Lenin, back from emigration on 8 (21) November 1905, "guided the activity of the Bolshevik group in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies." It does not tell you who chaired it. The name Khrustalev-Nosar does not occur in the book at all, and Trotsky, who succeeded him in the chair, is absent from the entire 1905 narrative except as a theory to be refuted. The Zimmerwald conference of September 1915 is likewise given four careful pages, its manifesto quoted and criticised at length, and the book never says who drafted it (Trotsky did); he appears there only as part of "the so-called Zimmerwald Centre, represented primarily by Grimm, Trotsky and Roland-Holst."
Against that, set something the volume does that most of its shelfmates do not. Its account of the Bolsheviks in March 1917 concedes, in its own voice, that the party's leadership in Petrograd got the line wrong before Lenin arrived: that the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee "failed" to advance the slogan of all power to the Soviets, that Kamenev's Pravda articles were "deeply erroneous", and that Stalin's call for "pressure" on the Provisional Government "was mistaken". This is a real concession, it is printed in a Brezhnev-era Academy volume, and it should be credited.
It should also be dated. The stenographic record of the all-Russian party conference of late March 1917, at which Stalin argued that "in so far as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it", was suppressed for a decade and published by Trotsky in 1937, in The Stalin School of Falsification. His foreword to the Russian edition says why he printed it: the minutes "are vivid but far from flattering. That is precisely why they are hidden from the party to this very day. This document is printed here for the first time and is thereby preserved from certain destruction." The Institute of the International Working-Class Movement reached the same conclusion forty-one years later, in one subordinate clause, and without a source.
Volume Three does not mention the Moscow Trials, the Left Opposition, "socialism in one country", the Popular Front, the Third Period, "social fascism", the POUM, Spain, Kronstadt 1921 or the Comintern's dissolution. None of that is a finding, and it would be dishonest to bank it as one. The book ends in March 1917; every item on that list postdates its last page by years or decades, and a volume covering 1905–17 has no more business discussing the Popular Front than Volume One had discussing 1937. Ernst Thälmann appears twice — once, correctly, as leader of the Hamburg transport workers before 1914. Kronstadt appears five times, always as the 1906 mutiny or the 1917 defection of the Baltic Fleet. That is chronology, not evidence.
Two further tests this series has been applying to Progress volumes also come back empty here, and for the same structural reason. "Peaceful coexistence" occurs nowhere in the book, so there is no doctrine being sourced to Lenin without quoting him. Brest-Litovsk occurs once, in passing, so the amalgam that three foreign-policy volumes commit — putting Bukharin's revolutionary-war position in Trotsky's mouth — cannot arise. Both are absences of opportunity, not of intention. And an expectation I was given, that a 1983 volume would be answerable from the 1930s Trotskyist press for the first time in this series, does not survive contact with the book: nothing in it falls after March 1917, so the contemporaneous reply has to come from Trotsky's own 1906 and 1930 texts and from the Fourth International's retrospective writing, not from the Kirov or Spanish material.
The absence that does count is a smaller one. Julius Martov, co-founder of Iskra and leader of the Menshevik-Internationalists who opposed the war from 1914, appears twice in 296,000 words: once as a co-editor of a liquidationist history, and once inside the title of a Lenin article. A book which devotes chapters to the Zimmerwald movement and to the crisis of the Second International has effectively no room for the man who led the Russian left opposition to the war outside the Bolshevik party.
Set the Russian chapters aside and a different book appears, and a reader told only about the polemics would be badly served.
Chapter 8, on the working class in the colonial and dependent countries, is the best thing in the volume and among the best things in this whole series. Its North African section works from Gabriel Baer's Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, 1969), Charles-Robert Ageron on the Algerian Muslims (PUF, 1968), Charles Stewart's The Economy of Morocco (Harvard, 1964), French agricultural handbooks of 1914 and 1929, and Soviet monographs, and it does something a lazier book would not: it looks at the European workers in Algeria and Tunisia and finds them stratified rather than uniformly privileged. Their wages were higher than Arab workers' and still "as a rule, even below the official subsistence minimum"; some were becoming a labour aristocracy and some were not; and it was the ones who did not who started the strikes and the unions. That is a real historical argument with an edge on it. The account of Arab agricultural labourers — a kilogram of bread a day, two litres of olive oil a month, sleeping in the open, the rais skimming the wage, "legitimate" deductions of 7 to 13 per cent in Egypt — is documented, specific and unsentimental.
The Latin American section is comparably good on Luis Emilio Recabarren, the Chilean printer elected to Congress in 1906 — "the first time that a worker had become a member of parliament in Latin America" — and follows him through the Democratic Party, El Despertar de los Trabajadores and the founding of the Socialist Labour Party in 1912 without flattening him into a proto-Bolshevik. The chapters on Germany and Austria-Hungary quarry the party congress protocols and Sozialistische Monatshefte directly, which means the revisionists are quoted saying what they actually said. The account of 4 August 1914 is accurate and unflinching about the size of the internal opposition: fourteen Social-Democrat deputies opposed the war credits in caucus, "could not bring themselves to break away from the Party's Board and the faction's majority and voted in favour", and Liebknecht broke ranks alone in December. The final historiographical chapter engages G. D. H. Cole and Julius Braunthal by name rather than gesturing at "bourgeois falsifiers". Details are cared for: an Ivanovo factory owner in 1905 complaining that a "duocracy" was in evidence in his city; the last appeal of the Presnya fighting squads — "Generation after generation in all countries will learn staunchness from the Presnya experience."
The theory of opportunism the book offers is also, on its own terms, a real one and not an epithet. "The social base of the growing opportunism was the petty bourgeoisie, the labour aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy," it says, and it names the mechanism: concessions won by struggle, plus "the imperialists' bribing of the upper crust of the working class", plus the specific conditions of a long peaceful expansion. That is Lenin's chain, stated correctly. It is even applied with some discrimination — at Stuttgart in 1907, "Unlike these rightists, Jaures, Vaillant and even Vandervelde argued for the need to carry out special anti-militarist activities and to take most effective mass anti-war action." The book can give credit to men it is about to condemn. It simply cannot do it for one of them.
For the theory the book attacks and never states: Results and Prospects (1906), chapters IV–V, and The Permanent Revolution (1930), especially chapter 6, "On the Skipping of Historical Stages", and the twelve postulates of chapter 10. For the specific question of Parvus, Trotsky's "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution" (1939). For the March 1917 conference, The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), chapters 14 and 15, which print the record the Institute paraphrases.
But the text worth putting beside this volume is not a polemic at all. In July–August 1947, Fourth International carried an essay on Trotsky by Ernest Germain — Ernest Mandel — which does exactly what Volume Three refuses to do. It criticises Lenin: "There is in Lenin, in his writings of 1905, in his ideas before 1917 on the nature of the Russian revolution, a reticence to leave the realm of the immediate, to push to its end the concept of the proletariat as the motivating force of the revolution." It quotes Trotsky against hagiography — "Only incurable philistines imagine Lenin as a saint who never made a mistake." And on the August Bloc of 1912, which is the one substantial charge Volume Three brings that a serious reader would want tested, it concedes the point outright: Trotsky "remained too attached to the 'traditional' and inadequate organizational forms of Western social democracy", and "That is why he permitted himself to embark on the notorious 'August bloc,' which was entirely hostile to his political concepts."
That is the difference between the two traditions on this ground, and it is not a difference about facts. Both agree there was an August Bloc; both think it was a mistake. One of them can say so about its own founder in print, in its own theoretical journal, seven years after his murder. The other cannot name the chairman of the first Soviet.
A footnote on the archive, since this series tries to give readers somewhere to go. The plainest statement that Trotsky chaired the St Petersburg Soviet in 1905 and the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 that I could find in the contemporaneous press is Max Shachtman's, in The New International for August 1941 — but by that date the magazine was the organ of Shachtman's Workers Party, which had split from the Fourth International the previous year over the class character of the USSR, and it should not be cited as this tradition's own voice. The fact is not in dispute between them. Only in Moscow was it in dispute.
Volume One's introduction in this series ended by suggesting that its own years — 1500 to 1870, where no faction had a stake and no one had been shot for a wrong answer — were the only ones in which these historians could do their job properly, and that this was why Ponomarev had to write the introduction himself. Volume Three tests that and refines it. The constraint is not chronological. Within this single book, at a single moment, the section on Tunisian agricultural labour is free and the section on the Petersburg Soviet is not; a Chilean printer of 1906 can be described as he was, and the chairman of the first workers' council in history cannot be named. What determines which is not the date but the distance from the party's own genealogy.
That is worth knowing precisely because it means the book is usable. Read chapters 5, 7 and 8 — the trade unions, the mass movement country by country, the colonial world — as the serious comparative labour history they are, and read them with the confidence that these authors were good at their trade. Then read chapters 1, 3, 4 and 12 knowing that a name has been removed from them, that the doctrine attributed to that name is quoted from a man who did not hold it, and that in a book with several hundred footnotes the accused is the one figure whose own words were never opened.
Quotations from the Progress text are given as printed, except that obvious scanning damage has been corrected silently: the volume renders Lenin's 1909 letter to Zinoviev as "Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalism", where the last word is factionalist, and prints "Gentrism" for Centrism and "Roland-Hoist" for Roland-Holst.