A dictionary is the most confident form a body of thought can take. An argument invites reply; a definition does not. It states what a word means, closes the entry, and moves to the next letter of the alphabet. When the Political Literature Publishers of Moscow issued the second Russian edition of A Dictionary of Political Economy in 1981, and Progress Publishers put it into English in 1985 under the editorship of Professor M. I. Volkov, the ambition was exactly this: to fix, in alphabetical order and in flat declarative prose, the settled meaning of every category a Soviet economist was permitted to use. The Publishers' Note is precise about the pedigree. The entries refer the reader back to the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and of Lenin "put out by Progress Publishers (Moscow) in English"; cross-references are marked "see"; the whole is a closed system pointing only at itself and at the canon it treats as scripture. This is not a book that argues. It is a book that rules.
The date on the spine is 1985, but the date of the thought is 1981, and the distinction matters. This is the second Russian edition, and its intellectual furniture is entirely that of the late Brezhnev years — the doctrine of "developed socialism", the economy of the tenth and eleventh five-year plans, the capitalist world still defined by the oil shock and "the third recession in the capitalist world during the last decade". There is no perestroika (restructuring) here, no glasnost, not a hint of the acceleration campaign; Gorbachev was a year from power when the English appeared, and the dictionary does not know he is coming. It is a monument raised at the exact moment the thing it monumentalised had stopped growing. Soviet growth rates had been sliding through the 1970s; by 1981 the stagnation was visible to anyone with the figures. The Dictionary records none of it. Its confidence is that of a system describing itself in the mirror it built for the purpose, and it is worth reading precisely because the mirror was official. This is what the largest state claiming descent from October taught its own economists that economics was.
Like its shelf-mates in this catalogue — Rumyantsev's Political Economy (1983), the collectively authored Fundamentals of Political Economy (1980), the Ryndina–Chernikov Political Economy of Capitalism (1974) — the Dictionary is a product of the Soviet academy working to a brief, not the work of a named scholar following an argument where it led. It reads as such: even, anonymous, seamless. Volkov's name sits on the title page, but the prose has no individual author; it is the collective voice of an institution, and the institution's task was not discovery but consolidation. These reference works form a deliberate ecosystem. The textbook (Rumyantsev) teaches the doctrine, the manual (Fundamentals) drills it, and the dictionary fixes it — assigns each term its official meaning so that the textbook and the manual, and every dissertation and lecture downstream of them, can be checked against a single authorised standard. A companion volume, A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (1984), does the same office for the political categories. Together they constitute the boundary-markers of an entire discipline: not books to be read through, but instruments against which other books are measured. That is why the seams matter more here than in any single monograph. A definition that quietly excludes a possibility excludes it not for one reader but for the whole field that treats the dictionary as authority.
Begin with the load-bearing entries, because in a dictionary the definitions are the doctrine. The interesting move is consistent, and once you see it you see it everywhere. The categories inherited from Marx's analysis of capitalism — commodity, value, money, the law of value — are not abandoned under socialism. They are retained, and then disarmed. Each is defined twice: once as a blind, coercive force under capitalism, and once as a tame instrument under socialism, the same word wearing a collar.
Take the commodity, the cell from which the whole of Capital unfolds. Under capitalism, the Dictionary says, "the commodity is the simplest cell of capitalist economy, containing the seeds of all the specifics and contradictions of this economy." Then the collar goes on: "In the socialist economy, the commodity is the product of directly socialised labour; it is manufactured in a planned way by socialist enterprises for the satisfaction of the social requirements." The same object, the same word, but its danger has been legislated away. Money receives identical treatment. Under private ownership it is "a tool for exploitation of the working people"; under socialism "it embodies social labour united through socialist ownership, and so cannot become a tool of exploitation. The functions of money under socialism become functions of planned economic management." Cannot is doing enormous work in that sentence. It is not an observation about Soviet money; it is a definition, and a definition cannot be falsified by events.
The law of value gets the same architecture. "Given private ownership of the means of production," the entry reads, "the law of value acts as a spontaneous regulator of production" — spontaneous being the key term of abuse throughout the book, the mark of everything blind and unmastered. Under socialism the spontaneity is gone, the law survives only as a "lever" consciously worked by the planners, and the entry looks forward to the day "the law of value will cease to operate" altogether. The whole conceptual apparatus of classical Marxism is thus preserved, embalmed, and made safe. What was a theory of how a system escapes human control becomes a theory of how human control has been achieved.
And at the centre sits the category that certifies all the others: developed socialism. There is, tellingly, no plain entry for "Socialism" in this dictionary of political economy. The alphabet runs from "Socialism, Bourgeois Economic Theories of" straight to "Socialist Accumulation"; socialism itself is defined only in its mature, honorific form, under Developed Socialism, "the totality of socialism's relations of production at its mature stage." And the entry makes the boast plainly: "The society of developed socialism reached in the USSR is to date the highest point of social progress." That is the sentence the whole book exists to protect. Everything else — the tamed commodity, the disarmed money, the consciously wielded law of value — is scaffolding around it. The corresponding law, the "law of planned, balanced development", which one might expect to be the theoretical heart of a socialist political economy, turns out on inspection to be almost empty: barely more than a cross-reference to Long-Term Planning and a single sentence of Lenin. The mechanism is asserted, not analysed. Political economy itself, the entry tells us, "is a component of Marxism-Leninism" — not an inquiry that might reach an inconvenient result, but a component of a doctrine already complete.
The sharpest way to read a reference work is not through what it defines but through the line it draws between the sayable and the unsayable — and a dictionary draws that line more starkly than any other kind of book, because to have no entry is to not exist. Here the tells are precise and countable.
Consider the vocabulary of economic malfunction — inflation, unemployment, shortage. Each has a place in the book, and each is defined in such a way that it cannot be predicated of the Soviet Union. Inflation is "a means of redistributing national income and social wealth in the interests of the ruling classes under capitalism, a method of intensifying the exploitation of labour by capital." Not a monetary phenomenon that might occur anywhere money circulates — which, as the Dictionary itself concedes, includes the USSR — but a weapon of a ruling class the USSR does not have. Unemployment is defined in its first four words as "a socio-economic phenomenon unavoidable under the capitalist" system, and the long entry that follows counts only capitalist unemployed, in Chicago and Manchester and the Ruhr. Deficit and shortage appear only in the capitalist and foreign-trade entries; the socialist economy is characterised, on the contrary, "by the absence of budget deficits". The words exist. Their application to the Soviet Union has been defined out of possibility.
The point is not that Soviet economic life was free of these things. Every Soviet consumer knew the queue, the empty shelf, the good that was "deficit" — the word defitsit was a fixture of everyday Russian precisely because shortage was a permanent feature of the planned economy. The suppressed pressures on prices were real enough that they would erupt into open inflation the moment controls were lifted at the end of the decade. A political economy adequate to its subject would have had a theory of these phenomena; the Hungarian economist János Kornai was constructing exactly such a theory of the shortage economy in these same years. The Dictionary does not lack the theory by accident. It has defined the vocabulary so that the daily experience of its own readers has no name in the science that claims to describe their society.
The most eloquent gap is one word with no entry at all. Search the whole Dictionary of Political Economy — a work of some 169,000 words — for bureaucracy, and you will find the adjective "bureaucratic" exactly once and the noun nowhere. A dictionary of political economy with no entry for bureaucracy is like a dictionary of medicine with no entry for infection. The omission is not an oversight; it is the constitutive silence of the entire tradition. To grant bureaucracy an economic definition would be to concede that a social layer standing above the plan might have interests of its own — and that concession is exactly what the category "developed socialism" is built to prevent.
The same boundary runs through the book's treatment of its own tradition's dissenters, and here the erasure is historical as well as conceptual. This is a dictionary of political economy, the discipline of the great debates of the 1920s — the debate over industrialisation, over where the resources for building socialism in a peasant country would come from, over the "scissors" between agricultural and industrial prices. That debate produced the most original Soviet economic thought of the century. Yevgeni Preobrazhensky's theory of "primitive socialist accumulation", Nikolai Bukharin's counter-argument for growth through the market and the smychka (the worker–peasant alliance) — this was political economy at the highest level, conducted by the revolution's own economists. The Dictionary contains not one of their names. Preobrazhensky: zero. Bukharin: zero. "Primitive socialist accumulation", the single most important concept the early Soviet economists contributed to the field: absent. In its place stands a bland entry, "Socialist Accumulation", defined as "the planned utilisation of part of the national income" — accumulation without pain, without a peasantry to squeeze, without an argument ever having been had. The men were shot in 1937 and 1938; the book completes the sentence by erasing the thought. A reader coming to Soviet economics through this dictionary would never learn that the questions it answers so smoothly were once the subject of a life-and-death dispute among Bolsheviks.
Trotsky, who cannot be quite erased because he is too large, is instead miniaturised. He appears twice in the entire volume. Once in the entry on Reformism, where "L. Trotsky" is filed in a list of reformists between Vandervelde and Scheidemann — an astonishing placement for the theorist of permanent revolution, but a revealing one. And once, unnamed but unmistakable, in the entry on Opportunism, where "'Left' opportunism (Trotskyism)" is said to use "ultra-revolutionary phrase to cover itself, pushing the people into adventurist actions." Note the scare-quotes around 'Left' — the same scare-quotes the CPSU's ideological apparatus had been printing for a decade, in Ponomarev's directive to expose Trotskyism's kinship with "opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions". The charge is pure essence: a phraseology, a covering, an adventurism, with no dated act attached that could ever be shown not to have happened. This is the definitional signature of the whole operation. Capitalist categories are pinned to specified, refutable behaviour — inflation does this, unemployment rises in this phase of the cycle. The tradition's own opponents are convicted by definition, of being what they are.
Set beside these entries the book that answered them in advance. In 1936, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky devoted the fourth chapter, "The Struggle for Productivity", to precisely the categories the Dictionary would later embalm — money, value, and the plan — and reached the opposite conclusion on every one.
Where the Dictionary holds that socialist money "cannot become a tool of exploitation" and that its functions "become functions of planned economic management", Trotsky insisted that Soviet money remained money, and dangerously so. "The more elementary functions of money," he wrote, "as measures of value, means of exchange and medium of payment, are not only preserved, but acquire a broader field of action than they had under capitalism." He went further, to the point the Dictionary most needs to suppress: "the sole authentic money is that based upon gold. All other money is only a substitute." A currency the state could print at will was not a mastered instrument but a temptation, and the temptation had been indulged. Trotsky traced the inflation of the first five-year plan through its own official figures — the note issue climbing from 1.7 billion rubles in 1928 to 8.4 billion by 1933 — and named its effect without euphemism: "currency inflation, inevitably producing a credit inflation, entails a substitution of fictitious for real magnitudes, and corrodes the planned economy from within."
That sentence is the exact refutation of the entry the Dictionary would print half a century later. Inflation, the Moscow lexicographers ruled, is a capitalist phenomenon, a weapon of a ruling class; the socialist economy is marked "by the absence of budget deficits". Trotsky had watched the Soviet economy generate inflation on a heroic scale and had watched the leadership deny it was possible — "The ruling circles," he wrote, "were completely possessed by the opinion that with a planned economy inflation is not to be feared. This means approximately that if you possess a compass there is no danger in a leaking ship." The Dictionary's definition of money as a mere instrument of "planned economic management" is the very doctrine Trotsky was mocking: he called the ruble, under that doctrine, "a conventional label of the planned economy — that is, a universal distribution card", money that "has ceased to be money". And he identified who benefited from the confusion. By manipulating the ruble's purchasing power across different strata, "the bureaucracy deprived itself of the necessary instrument for objectively measuring its own successes and failures" — restoring, in one word, the actor the Dictionary would define out of existence. The book that has no entry for bureaucracy is answered by the book that made bureaucracy the centre of Soviet political economy.
None of this required the Dictionary to lie about a single figure. It required only that it define its terms so that certain sentences could not be formed. Trotsky's chapter is a catalogue of the sentences the Dictionary forbids. His standard — the USSR as a transitional, contradictory formation in which value, money and the market survive because scarcity survives, presided over by a privileged bureaucracy with interests of its own — is the standard against which the Dictionary's serene definitions should be read. The reader who wants the argument the alphabet suppressed will find it in chapter 4, and in chapters 5 and 6 on the Soviet Thermidor and the growth of inequality.
It would be a mistake, and the kind of mistake this dictionary invites by its own dogmatism, to conclude that everything in it is corrupt. A great deal of it is simply competent, and some of it is more than competent. The entries on the categories of Capital — abstract and concrete labour, absolute and relative surplus value, the accumulation of capital, absolute and differential rent, the aggregate social product — are lucid, accurate expositions of Marx, the fruit of a genuine scholarly tradition that ran unbroken from the Institute's editing of the Collected Works. The definition of abstract labour as "the social labour of those who produce commodities; labour in general, regarded independently of its concrete form" is exactly right, and better put than in many a Western textbook. The long biographical entry on Marx himself — tracing the manuscripts of the 1850s and 1860s, the six-book plan of 1857, the fourth volume that became Theories of Surplus-Value — is real intellectual history, the sort of thing Progress could do well because the people who did it cared about the texts.
The paradox is worth stating plainly, because it is the key to using the book. On capitalism the Dictionary is often sharp, because on capitalism Marxist categories are permitted to do their critical work: the entries on state-monopoly capitalism, on capitalist economic programming, on the reserve army of the unemployed are hard-edged and, within their frame, illuminating. It is only when the same categories are turned toward the Soviet economy that they are made to go soft. The instrument is sound; it has simply been forbidden to point in one direction. A reader who takes the entries on classical and Marxian political economy as a genuine reference — and cross-checks the entries on socialism against The Revolution Betrayed and against the historical record the book erases — will get real value from both halves, provided the value is not confused with the verdict.
That is finally what this dictionary is: a verdict issued as a set of definitions, the codified self-understanding of a system at the moment before it lost the power to define itself. Four years after the second Russian edition, the words perestroika and glasnost would enter the language the Dictionary had declared closed, and within a decade the state whose economy it described "to date the highest point of social progress" had ceased to exist. The book did not see it coming, because a dictionary cannot: its whole method is to treat the contingent as the settled, the arguable as the defined, the historical as the eternal. Read as truth, it explains nothing. Read as a document — as the exact boundary of what a Soviet economist in 1981 was permitted to think — it is one of the most instructive objects this series contains. The alphabet, it turns out, has an edge, and everything interesting lies on the far side of it.