A dictionary makes an unusual polemic, because it does not argue. It assigns. It decides which things in the world are things at all — which deserve a headword, a definition, a settled meaning — and it presents the result as the furniture of reality rather than as a position taken. That is precisely what makes this book worth reading now. A Dictionary of Scientific Communism contains 201 entries and 158,780 words, and almost nothing in it is a lie of the simple sort. The falsification is in the architecture.
The Russian original, Nauchny kommunizm: Slovar, appears in this edition's imprint under the editorship of A. M. Rumyantsev — an economist and Academy of Sciences figure who had edited Problems of Peace and Socialism and, briefly and unhappily, Pravda, and who was associated with the more permissive end of the apparatus rather than its hard core. The volume is not the work of a hack. It is a committee product of the Soviet academic establishment at the top of its form, and it is competent at what it sets out to do.
The date on the spine is the date of the text. The copyright page carries no printing history and the book names no earlier edition; the latest events it cites are the Political Declaration of the Warsaw Treaty member-countries at Prague in January 1983 and the 1983 Law on Work Collectives. Nothing later than 1983 appears anywhere in it. This is a book composed in Andropov's fifteen months and issued in Chernenko's.
What it sets out to do requires explaining, because "scientific communism" was not a literary genre but an institution. From the early 1960s it was a compulsory subject in every Soviet higher-education establishment: engineers, doctors, agronomists and philologists all sat examinations in it. It had chairs, departments, dissertation councils and career ladders. The book's own entry under that headword gives the official self-description — a science with "its own laws and categories", the "most closely and immediately connected with the practical revolutionary struggle" of the three components of Marxism-Leninism — and then, with real candour about its own character, adds that it is "a profoundly partisan science". This is the crib for a nationwide curriculum, exported in English for foreign students, Western communist parties and sympathetic libraries. Read it as a syllabus and it becomes legible.
Now the architecture. There are no biographical entries at all — no persons among the headwords. That decision does a great deal of work. Lenin is named 408 times across the text; Trotsky twenty-one, nearly all of them inside a single hostile entry; Stalin five. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko are named nowhere in the book. History has agents in this dictionary only when they are safe.
Test the same architecture against events. There is no entry for collectivisation; the subject is dissolved into "Agricultural Co-operation", which reports that "the most acceptable form proved to be the agricultural artel" and dates its dominance from 1933. The word famine does not appear in the book. Neither does Gulag, Bukharin, Kronstadt, Left Opposition, Luxemburg or Yugoslavia — each checked against the scanner-damage variants that make a mangled name return zero exactly like an absent one, and each surviving the check. Purge appears once, and refers to the Comintern's 1924 decision to purge its member parties of right and "left" elements. Workers' self-management does not occur in the book in any form — a striking absence in a volume whose closest equivalent headword, "Communist Social Self-government", places genuine self-administration safely at the far end of the communist future, after "a new individual" has been "shaped".
Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 appear as dated events once each, jointly, in the entry on "Counter-revolution", as cases where counter-revolution, "with the support of revisionist and nationalistic elements", posed "a serious threat even for a consolidated new system". Undated, they recur as things that were stopped: "Defence of the Socialist Homeland" records that Soviet efforts "prevented the restoration of capitalism in Hungary and the reprisal against revolutionary Cuba, and curbed the 'quiet counter-revolution' in Czechoslovakia". Prevented and curbed by nobody in particular. No army crosses a border in this book. Eurocommunism has no entry either: it surfaces in a single subordinate clause in "Revisionism", attached to the French communist Jean Ellenstein.
The most consequential silence is on the years 1936–38, and here the book does speak — in a sentence readers should sit with. Under "Complete and Final Victory of Socialism": "Socialist changes during the second five-year-plan period (1933–37) established socialist production relations throughout the national economy and eliminated the internal forces that wanted to restore capitalism." That is the Terror, rendered as a change in production relations. The string 1937 occurs nowhere in the book. The book's one direct treatment of the period comes under "Personality Cult", at 593 words — shorter than its entry on Aesthetic Education, shorter than its entry on Futurology, and well below the median entry length of 787 words. Stalin, it says, "did a great service to the building of socialism in the USSR"; his cult showed itself in "uncalled-for repressions and other violations of socialist legality, which damaged Soviet society"; and then the closing of the file: "These distortions, though quite serious, did not modify the nature of socialist society or shatter the foundations of socialism in the USSR." No number is given, no institution named, no trial described. The Twentieth Congress is not mentioned in the entry — its single appearance anywhere in the book is inside "Revisionism", where the criticism of Stalin's cult figures not as a reckoning but as an occasion that emboldened revisionists.
There is one place where the aftermath is allowed a particular. Under "National Relations Under Socialism", the denunciation of the cult is credited with "restoration of national autonomy for the Balkars, Ingushes, Kalmyks, Karachais and Chechens". Five deported nations are named. The deportations are not. The reader who does not already know what happened to those peoples in 1943 and 1944 will not learn it here, and will not be given a word for which to look.
The entry on "Bureaucracy" is the keystone, and it is worth reading closely because it is where the book must protect itself. Bureaucracy is defined as a class phenomenon of exploiting societies; "the most developed B. appears in capitalist society"; Lenin is quoted to the effect that it is "purely and exclusively a bourgeois institution". Under socialism only "vestiges" remain, and the remedies proposed are the ones an apparatus proposes for itself: clearer delineation of functions, less redundancy, and — per the decisions of the 24th, 25th and 26th congresses — "modern means and methods of management (including computers, automated systems, etc)". A theory of bureaucracy that cannot locate a bureaucracy in the Soviet Union is not a theory; it is an alibi. And it is the alibi on which everything else in the volume depends, because once a privileged administrative stratum is admitted to exist, the entries on "Democracy, Socialist", "State of the Whole People" and "Criticism and Self-criticism" have to be rewritten.
The doubling around Trotsky is the clearest single demonstration that the dictionary knows what it is doing. "Uninterrupted Revolution" treats the idea of revolution in permanence as authentically Marx's and Engels's, quotes the 1850 Address to the Communist League with approval, reports Lenin's "We stand for uninterrupted revolution", and says that "a formal approach to this concept made a caricature of it" in Trotsky. "Trotskyism" then describes Trotsky's version of the same idea as "plagiarising" it. The entry is 1,000 words of hostility, but it is also the most informative thing in the book about the tradition it attacks, and it gives away more than it means to: that the Fourth International was founded in 1938, that it holds the socialist states to be "workers' states", some degenerated and others degenerating, that its opponents number "seven rival international groupings", that "in the second half of the 1970s, a reformist trend began to gain strength". One claim is a straightforward falsification and should be named: that Trotskyism "denied the liberation character of the struggle against fascism". It did not. It refused the subordination of workers' organisations to Allied war aims, which is a different proposition, and one the reader is not permitted to see stated.
The Trotskyism entry opens with the sentence on which the classification system in this whole vocabulary turns:
Trotskyism is a petty-bourgeois opportunist current in ideology and politics which is hostile to Marxism-Leninism and shrouds its opportunism with radical leftist phraseology.
Two things should be said about that sentence, and a dictionary is the only kind of book in which they can be said cleanly, because a dictionary has to define its terms in the abstract, with no named opponent to hide the definition behind.
The first is that nothing in it is an act. It is entirely an essence — a current, in ideology and politics, which is hostile. Compare the same word in the hands of the organisation being described. The Tenth World Congress documents of the Fourth International, printed in full in Intercontinental Press on 23 December 1974, denounce "the ultraopportunist policy of the CPI and the CPI(M) — a policy of governmental collaboration, alliance with the possessing classes and their parties, repression of popular movements, use of violence against other tendencies of the workers movement". (Two notes on that reading. The scan of the issue breaks words across its column gutters and prints CPl for CPI and vioience for violence; those are the scanner's marks, not the drafters', and they are corrected here. The printed text also glosses each abbreviation in square brackets — "the CPI [Communist party of India] and the CPI(M) [Communist party of India (Marxist)]" — and the glosses are dropped above.) That is a named organisation, in a named country, doing four named things, any of which could be shown not to have happened. The dictionary's sentence names nothing that could be checked. Worse, it inoculates itself: the clause "shrouds its opportunism with radical leftist phraseology" disposes in advance of the one observation a reader might make against it, which is that the accused sound more revolutionary than the accuser. Sounding revolutionary is converted into further evidence of the charge. In a polemic that might be carelessness. In a dictionary it is a design decision, and the whole entry is built on it.
It is worth being exact about what this does and does not show, because the obvious version of the argument is wrong. It is not a point about how often the word is used. Progress Publishers' own Lenin reader Marx — Engels — Marxism — a volume in this same catalogue — uses opportunis- 111 times in 175,563 words, four times the rate across the Progress list and well above the rate in this dictionary. Lenin was not more ritualistic than the people who came after him. He simply had more opponents he was willing to name. In that book the word arrives attached to persons — Kautsky is named more than 130 times, alongside Hilferding, Martov and "the O.C.-ists" — and to a described act: "the opportunists (Social-chauvinists) are working hand in hand with the imperialist bourgeoisie precisely towards creating an imperialist Europe". A reader can go and see whether that is true. There is nothing in the dictionary's definition that a reader could go and see.
The second question is the harder one, and it is the one worth putting to any book of this kind: could the category, as this book defines it, ever be turned on the author's own side? Read the definitions and it very nearly could. "Opportunism" — at 318 words the third-shortest substantive entry in the whole dictionary, against a median of 787 — is "adaptation of the policy and ideology of the working-class movement to the interests and needs of nonproletarian" strata, and, we are told, "is usually associated with revisionism (q.v.) or dogmatism (q.v.)". "Dogmatism" is "a theoretical postulate of all kinds of opportunist distortions", and — this is the sentence that matters — "as a rule, D. is connected with the personality cult (q. v.) and canonisation of statements uttered by a particular theorist". Follow the cross-references the dictionary itself supplies, in the direction it points them, and you go from opportunism to dogmatism to the personality cult; and the only personality cult the book names is Stalin's, in the CPSU, for a quarter of a century. Every link in that chain is the dictionary's own, and it is one step from a conclusion it never draws and cannot draw: that the ruling party of the Soviet Union falls under its own headword.
Everywhere else the definitions are wired to prevent that. "Revisionism", the longest of the deviation entries, states its social aetiology in the second paragraph: "R. is engendered by the economic and socio-political conditions of imperialism", with the labour aristocracy as its social basis — so the disease is produced outside the socialist countries by definition, and can only be imported. There is no headword for sectarianism at all, although the word is used ten times; there is no headword for the state as such. Where the book comes closest to admitting the thing in its own house, it turns outward in the same sentence: the entry on "Violence (Coercion)" warns that "if education, persuasion, and organisation are replaced by bureaucratic administration and coercion, by V., while democratic principles are violated (see Personality Cult), the cause of socialism is seriously damaged" — and then immediately explains that the movement "struggles against opportunist, revisionist concepts". "Survivals of the Past in the People's Minds and Behaviour" concedes "violations of socialist legality, deviations from the principles of socialist democracy, excessive administration by injunction" — as survivals, that is, as residue of an older society rather than a product of this one. And "Criticism and Self-criticism", 1,016 words on the method by which a socialist society is supposed to correct itself, contains the sentence that governs the entire apparatus: "The Communist Party and the socialist state only support criticism that helps society advance along the path of progress and successfully tackle the tasks that arise." Criticism is licensed by its result. There is no instance anywhere in the volume of the CPSU standing as the object of any of these categories rather than as the force combating them. The Fourth International's congress documents, by contrast, record a section's dated self-criticism — "The POR accepted that criticism in its self-criticism of April 1, 1972" — and warn of petty-bourgeois pressures transmitted "into the Fourth International itself". That is the difference, and it is not a difference about the word.
There is a second, blunter consequence of the same design. "Left"-wing opportunism, we are told, is "now represented by Trotskyism" — on the international scene, by Trotskyism and nothing else. This is a Soviet reference work published in 1984. Mao does not appear in it. Neither does Maoism, Peking or Tito; China occurs once, describing egalitarian land use in ancient rural communities. The largest split in the history of the communist movement, twenty years old and still running, has been removed from the vocabulary altogether, and the whole category has been left to a tendency the same entry dismisses as "small groups standing outside the organised working-class movement". The classification is not a description of the world. It is a seating plan.
None of this means the volume is worthless, and it would be dishonest to imply it. The entries on the history of the workers' movement are, on the whole, careful and usable. "First International", "Second International", "Paris Commune" and "Popular Front" are sober narrative history with accurate dates and real quotation, and the Commune entry in particular is a good short account of the concrete measures of March–May 1871. The entry on the Third International concedes error: at the Sixth Congress of 1928 "a certain deviation to sectarianism and political doctrinairism" appeared, and the slogan "Class Against Class!" "sometimes amounted, in fact, to an underestimation of the importance of working-class unity of action". That is the Third Period admitted, in the official voice, and it is more than one expects. The same entry then narrates the dissolution of the Comintern straightforwardly — "In May 1943 the Presidium of the C.I. Executive Committee adopted a resolution on dissolving C.I." — and quotes the resolution's own reasoning, that the 1919 organisational form "gradually outlived itself as the movement expanded and its tasks in individual countries became more complicated". It offers no view on what else was happening in May 1943, and it does not need to; the reader who wants the wartime diplomacy will look elsewhere. But the entry does not suppress the event, and an earlier reading of this book which said it did was wrong.
The book is also, read against the grain, an excellent map — the best short one available in English — of what the Soviet state wanted taught in its final pre-Gorbachev year. Nearly 4,700 words go to the three peace entries — "Struggle for Peace" alone is the longest in the book at 2,209 words, nearly four times the length of the entry on Stalin's crimes — which is the Euromissile crisis speaking through the curriculum. This is doctrine being set hard at exactly the moment it was about to fail, and its confidence is part of the historical evidence.
The reply existed, and was in print in the same years. Ernest Mandel had argued the case for soviet democracy against the Twenty-Fifth Congress directly in "Brezhnev and Soviet Democracy" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 14 no. 14, 12 April 1976) and at greater length in "The Fight for Soviet Democracy in the USSR" (vol. 14 no. 34, 13 September 1976); his review of Rudolf Bahro's The Alternative, "A Powerful Case Against Bureaucratism" (vol. 15 no. 39, 24 October 1977), traces the East European analysis of bureaucracy from Djilas through Kuroń and Modzelewski to Bahro — the literature this dictionary was written to make unnecessary. And in the very month this volume was circulating, Cyril Smuga's "Workers pay for bureaucracy's 'economic reform'" (International Viewpoint 50, April 1984) reported the Polish state of war and what it had been for: the reform plan of 1982, he wrote, was meant to divert the workers from aspirations "expressed in the spontaneous development of the self-management movement during 1981". Poland is named five times in this dictionary — as a people's democracy, as a country with apartment-block committees, as a place where the Catholic Church impeded the cultural revolution. Solidarność is not named once, and neither is the movement Smuga is describing. The dictionary has no word for it. That is the finding.