This is the volume of the seven in which the man the whole series is built to write out of history was, for the years it covers, running the state it celebrates. Volume Four takes the story from the October insurrection of 1917 to the German defeat and the death-throes of the European revolutionary wave in 1923 — the Russian Revolution, Brest-Litovsk, the civil war, the founding of the Communist International, the revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Finland, Kronstadt, the trade-union controversy and the New Economic Policy. Across almost all of it Leon Trotsky was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then for Military and Naval Affairs, the man who negotiated at Brest and the man who built and commanded the Red Army that won the war the book spends three hundred pages narrating. A Soviet history of these particular years cannot simply delete him, as the volume on 1905–17 could delete the chairman of the first Soviet. It has to decide, event by event, which Trotsky to admit and which to suppress. Watching it decide is the most instructive thing in the book, and it is the reason this volume is more revealing than the ones on either side of it.
Get the date right first. The spine and the catalogue read 1984, and that is the year of the English translation — Progress Publishers, in the Chernenko interregnum, four months after Andropov's death. But the text is a Brezhnev-era book. The copyright page carries "© Издательство «Мысль», 1980" above "English translation © Progress Publishers 1984": the Russian original was closed in 1980, the last settled year of Brezhnev's late reign, and reached English readers four years later unaltered. The internal evidence agrees — Brezhnev's name appears eleven times and is the freshest political horizon in the book; the 26th Party Congress of 1981 is nowhere in it. So this is the Brezhnev settlement on the revolution and the civil war, and the settlement is the point: it fixes precisely how much of 1917–23 a Soviet reader of 1980 was to be told.
It is a large collective work, prepared under the USSR Academy of Sciences by several dozen named historians, each carrying a kandidat or doktor degree, with a team of contributors listed chapter by chapter, under an editorial board headed by V. V. Zagladin as editor-in-chief and co-chaired for the authors by Zagladin and Y. S. Drabkin. (Unlike Volumes One through Three and Five, this volume's surviving front matter does not print the name of the specific institute — "the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement" of the Academy — that produced the sister volumes; it names only the Academy of Sciences. The series, the committee and much of the personnel are continuous, but I state what the title page shows.) Above the board stands the same General Editorial Committee that signed the other volumes, and its first line is the one to keep in view: "B. N. Ponomarev, Chairman, T. T. Timofeyev, Deputy Chairman". Ponomarev was a Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, and in December 1971 he had put his name to a long article in Kommunist instructing the Party's theoretical cadres to expose Trotskyism's "kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions" — the scare quotes are in the original instruction. This is the book that carries out that directive across the one period in which Trotskyism's founder was a founder of the Soviet state.
The reader who comes to this volume from the one before it will notice at once that the temperature has dropped. In the 1905–17 volume the word opportunism and its cognates ran to nearly thirteen uses per ten thousand words, the densest in the entire Progress catalogue. Here it falls to a hundred and six occurrences as the text stands — about 3.3 per ten thousand words; joining words split across line-ends raises the figure somewhat, but nowhere near the previous volume's level. That is worth pausing on, because on the face of it the fall is paradoxical: this is the volume in which the split with "opportunism" actually happens, the volume of the founding of the Communist International in 1919, the organisational break with the Second International that the word exists to name. Why does the vocabulary of denunciation thin exactly when the denounced are expelled?
Because the enemy has changed address. Read the hundred-odd uses and almost all of them are spent on the social democracy of the Second International at the moment of its collapse and the moment of the schism: opportunism "became social-jingoism" in August 1914; the "opportunist leadership" of the reformist parties; the founding of the new parties "between the revolutionaries and the opportunists over vital issues". Once the Comintern is founded the opportunists are a separate, defeated, external camp, and an external camp is narrated more than it is cursed. What is striking is what the book does not call opportunism: the fierce disputes inside the Bolshevik Party that fill these same years. Brest, the militarisation of labour, the trade-union controversy, the Workers' Opposition, the "platform of the 46" — these are handled in an entirely different register, the register of a comrade's error. Bukharin's and Trotsky's trade-union theses are "mistaken statements" that were "refuted by principled criticism"; the Workers' Opposition is an "anarcho-syndicalist deviation"; even Stalin, arguing at Brest that there was no revolutionary movement in the West, is recorded as a man Lenin "did not agree with". The disqualifying nouns are kept for those outside the walls. The language of error is available inside them.
That distinction — opportunism for the enemy, error for the family — is where Trotsky's case is decided, because Trotsky in this volume is a man being moved, across five years and several hundred pages, from one category to the other.
Trotsky is present in this volume, unavoidably and by name, at every point where he can be shown hesitating, erring or opposing. He is there in October — "Trotsky, at that time chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, proposed waiting for the opening of the" Second Congress of Soviets, set against Lenin's insistence on striking first. He is there in the first Soviet government: "L. D. Trotsky became People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs." He is there at Brest, correctly: "Trotsky, who led the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk", and — this matters — the volume gets the Brest positions right. Where three foreign-policy volumes in this series put the revolutionary-war line into Trotsky's mouth (it was Bukharin's and the Left Communists'), this book, which actually narrates the dispute, records the vote accurately: "Trotsky's proposal, 'neither peace nor war' received 16 votes", against thirty-two for revolutionary war and fifteen for Lenin's peace, and it names the war party correctly as Lenin named them, "our pseudo-Lefts, Bukharin, Lomov, Uritsky and Co." The house amalgam does not occur here. It is a genuine result, and it should be reported as one: the volume closest to the event is the one that gets it right, which tells you the amalgam in the later books was not ignorance but convenience.
He is there again in 1920–21, in the trade-union controversy, where his real position is stated with substantial accuracy — that the unions should be "'shaken up' in Trotsky's expression" and folded into the state, that "Trotsky and his supporters developed plans for militarisation of the whole economy", and that the Ninth Congress "rejected Trotsky's claim that militarisation should be employed throughout the whole period of building" socialism. And he is there at the end, in 1923, as the "remnants of the earlier defeated opposition groupings united around Trotsky and the 'platform of the 46'", condemned through the resolution of the Thirteenth Party Conference of January 1924 as "not only an attempt to revise Bolshevism, a direct departure from Leninism".
Every one of these is a real event and most of the characterisations are, on the facts, defensible: Trotsky did counsel waiting for the Congress, did break off at Brest against Lenin's known view, did argue for the statification of the unions. This is the language of error, and error is admissible. What the volume removes is not Trotsky's mistakes. It is Trotsky's victory.
For the whole central span of the book — the civil war, the years 1918 to 1920 in which the Soviet republic survived against fourteen interventions and three White armies — Trotsky simply is not in the sentences. The Red Army is founded: "On January 15 (28), 1918, the Soviet Government decreed the organisation of a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army." It is built, fought and won with. The book names its field commanders freely — Frunze eight times, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Tukhachevsky, Yegorov — and it names Tsaritsyn, where Stalin and Voroshilov served. It names the institutions: "In September 1918 Revolutionary Military Councils (RMCs) were instituted for the Republic, the fronts and armies." But the man who was People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, who chaired the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic that those front and army councils reported to, who spent the war in the armoured train that is one of the enduring images of it, is nowhere near any of these words. In twenty-nine occurrences of his name, not one attaches to the Red Army he created. The commander-in-chief of the force whose victory is the spine of the volume has been lifted clean out of it.
The same surgery is performed on October, and here it reproduces a specific, documented forgery. The volume tells the reader that the insurrection was directed by the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, which is true, and then that "Its nucleus became the Military Revolutionary Centre of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party set up on October 16 and consisting of A. S. Bubnov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, Ya. M. Sverdlov, J. V. Stalin, and M. S. Uritsky." Combat operations are credited to three others: "The MRC put three of its members, V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, N. I. Podvoisky and G. I. Chudnovsky, in charge of combat operations." Trotsky, chairman of the Soviet whose committee this was and the acknowledged organiser of its work, appears in the October narrative only as the man who "proposed waiting". The five-man "Military Revolutionary Centre" is the exact device Trotsky spent a chapter dismantling in The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), where he shows it was a paper body that met and did nothing, elevated after the fact into the true directing organ for one reason — that Stalin was on it. Trotsky's rebuttal is precise and it is checkable: Stalin's school builds the legend on "a 'practical center for the organizational leadership of the insurrection,' of which, if you please, Trotsky was not a member. Neither was Lenin a member of that committee." The point is not that the Centre existed — it did, on paper — but that a committee neither Lenin nor Trotsky sat on is now the "nucleus" of the revolution, and the two men who actually led it have one been demoted to a doubter and the other reduced to a decree.
This series has a standing test: when a Progress volume attacks an opponent, does it cite that opponent to his own works, or only characterise him? On the earlier volumes the answer was stark — the 1905–17 book cited Luxemburg's collected works sixteen times and no work by Trotsky even once, with the doctrine attributed to him floating inside quotation marks sourced to nothing. This volume is, to its credit, a step more honest, and the honesty is worth stating exactly because it is the harder case for a critic. The charges against Trotsky here are mostly sourced — but they are sourced to Lenin. The refutation of the trade-union position runs through Lenin's "The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes"; the one place Trotsky is flatly labelled comes inside a quoted judgement from the controversy — "Trotsky's point of view is 75 per cent opportunist, Lenin keeps to the middle" — reported, not asserted in the Institute's own voice. These are real Lenin texts about real 1920–21 disputes, and a reader is better served by them than by the free-floating quotation marks of the previous volume.
But the asymmetry has not gone; it has only moved. Lenin is quoted at length; Trotsky is quoted never. Across the whole book the reader sees Lenin's side of every argument Trotsky lost and Trotsky's side of none of them. What Trotsky actually wrote about the militarisation of labour, about Brest, about the platform of the 46 — the reader is not shown a sentence of it, and cannot weigh the charge against the defence, because the defence is not in the room. An opponent refuted through his prosecutor's transcript is still an opponent you cannot cross-examine.
The sharpest single instance is Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" — the Testament — and it is sharp precisely because the book handles Stalin so honestly. On Stalin the volume does what the de-Stalinisation settlement of 1956 licensed it to do, and does it fully: it quotes the "Stalin is too rude" passage, and it does not stop at the euphemism. It goes on to report that "Lenin advised replacing him in that post" and quotes the description of the wanted successor — a man "more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades". The proposal to remove Stalin as General Secretary is present and correct. This is the licensed candour, and it is real; the same permission lets the book narrate Lenin's late clash with Stalin over the "autonomisation" of the republics and Stalin's "infatuation with pure administration", and to say that "initially Stalin's attitude to the criticism was incorrect". Error, once again, is admissible.
Now watch the same document handle Trotsky. Lenin's Testament weighed him in a single balance — Lenin called Trotsky "the most able man in the present Central Committee" and in the same breath faulted his self-assurance and his absorption in the administrative side of the work. The volume prints neither half of that. It reduces the whole assessment to five words — "he expressed political mistrust of Trotsky" — a characterisation Lenin's letter does not contain, and it drops "the most able man in the present Central Committee" entirely. The book that will quote Lenin proposing to sack Stalin will not quote Lenin praising Trotsky. That is not a silence forced by the period; the sentence sits in the Collected Works the Institute cites on nearly every page (vol. 36). It is a choice made inside a single quoted document, and it is the choice the whole volume is organised around.
The reflexivity test this series has come to trust asks not whether a book can admit an error — this one plainly can, about Zinoviev and Kamenev in October, about Stalin's rudeness and haste, about Bukharin's trade-union theses — but whether the category of opportunism ever turns inward on the Party's own line of descent. It does not, and Volume Four shows the mechanism at closer range than any other book in the series, because it captures Trotsky at the exact moment of transfer. Through 1918 he is an erring Bolshevik leader, criticised by act and date. By the closing pages, as the narrative reaches 1923 and the founding of the Left Opposition, the register visibly hardens: the "Trotskyite opposition" becomes "a direct departure from Leninism", and Lenin is retrospectively said to have waged "a relentless struggle against the Mensheviks, the Trotskyites and opportunists of every stripe" — a sentence that quietly files Trotsky, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, among Lenin's lifelong enemies. You can read, within one volume, a man being moved out of the family and into the category. Nobody who stayed makes that journey. That is the finding, and it does not rest on a word-count.
None of this makes the volume worthless, and a reader told so would be badly misled, because most of it is not about Trotsky at all. Set the Russian-revolutionary chapters aside and a substantial work of comparative history remains, and it is often very good.
The core of the book after Part One is the European revolutionary wave of 1918–23, and it is narrated with real command and a genuinely internationalist eye. The November Revolution in Germany, the Austrian revolution, the short-lived Bavarian and Slovak Soviet republics, the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the workers' revolution in Finland — these get detailed, source-based treatment, and the book is alert to the international texture that a narrower account would miss: the Hungarian, Polish and Czech internationalists who commanded units in the Russian civil war, Béla Kun chairing the Central Federation of Foreign Groups in Turkestan, the fraternisation in the trenches after the Decree on Peace, the revolutionary shop-stewards of Berlin resolving to strike against the Brest ultimatum. The founding congresses of the Communist International are covered as institutional history, with the delegates, the secretariats and the debates named. On the colonial and national-liberation movements — a running thread through this series and consistently its strongest material — the book quarries a wide, largely non-Russian source base and treats the awakening of Asia and the Middle East as a subject in its own right rather than an appendage to Moscow. The account of the Baku oilfields and the multinational proletariat of the Caucasus, of the strike waves across the dependent countries, is specific and documented. This is serious labour history done by people who were good at it, and English readers of 1984 had few better single-volume surveys of the 1918–23 conjuncture available to them.
The candour about Bolshevik error, within its limits, is also worth having. A Brezhnev-era book that reports Lenin's proposal to remove Stalin, that names Stalin's mistake at Brest and his overreach on the national question, that concedes the October waverers, is not doing nothing. It is telling a good deal of the truth about its own leadership — up to the exact line where the truth would require restoring a name.
For the October narrative and the "Military Revolutionary Centre" legend, the direct answer is Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (1937): chapter 4, the "Letter to the Bureau of Party History", which dismantles the "practical centre" forgery, and chapter 12, "How the October Insurrection Actually Took Place", which reconstructs the events the volume renders as a decree. For the Red Army the volume unmakes him from, Trotsky left his own record in the military writings collected as How the Revolution Armed — the reports, orders and speeches of 1918–1923, from "Rallying the Army During the Civil War" (1919) to "The 5th Anniversary of the Red Army" (1923) — held in this project's Trotsky archive. For the early Comintern, whose founding this volume treats as unambiguous doctrine, the contemporaneous counter-argument is The Third International After Lenin (1928), whose long opening section, "The Program of the International Revolution or a Program of Socialism in One Country?", is the answer to the whole frame. For the opposition of 1923 that the book condemns through a conference resolution, read the document itself: Trotsky's The New Course (1923). And for the Testament, the omitted sentence is at Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 36 — the assessment of Trotsky as "the most able man in the present Central Committee" that the Institute had on its own shelf and did not print.
Two honest limits on the reply. The anti-Stalinist tradition is not united on Kronstadt, which this volume dispatches in three sentences as a Menshevik- and SR-led mutiny of "sailors... for the most part drawn from the peasantry", "quickly suppressed" — a framing that omits the rebels' actual demand for soviets free of the Party's monopoly, but which our own tradition has argued over rather than settled, Trotsky defending the suppression and others (Serge, later Ida Mett) condemning it; the reader should know the dispute is real on both sides. And the contemporaneous Trotskyist press held in this project begins only in 1934, so for 1917–23 the reply is necessarily Trotsky's own retrospective writing and Lenin's published texts, not a running commentary from the years themselves.
The introduction to the 1905–17 volume concluded that the Institute's constraint was not chronological but genealogical: within one book, at one moment, the section on a Chilean printer could be free while the section on the chairman of the first Soviet could not, and what decided which was distance from the Party's own line of descent. The volume on the 1930s confirmed it and added that the constraint attaches to the Institute's own voice — it could name a foreign catastrophe and not a domestic one. This volume adds the sharpest wrinkle of the three, because here the suppressed man cannot be suppressed. He held the offices; he signed the orders; he is in the record the historians are working from. So the operation becomes selective rather than total, and its logic stands exposed: admit the errors, delete the victories, source the charges to the prosecutor, drop the praise from the one document that carried both. Read the chapters on Germany, Austria, Hungary and the colonial world as the capable comparative history they are. Then read the chapters on October and the civil war knowing that the founder of the Red Army has been removed from the story of the Red Army, that the organiser of the insurrection has been reduced to a man who wanted to wait, and that the one figure the book cannot cite to a single line of his own is the one it most needs the reader never to hear.