This is the volume of the seven that had to cross the 1930s, and the way it crosses them is the whole story. Its Russian subtitle — Sozidatel sotsializma, borets protiv fashizma, "Builder of Socialism, Fighter against Fascism" — names its two subjects, and between them lie the events a Soviet history of the world workers' movement written in the first year of Gorbachev could confront or could not: the defeat of the Left and United Oppositions, forced collectivisation and the famine of 1932–33, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front and the Spanish war, and the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror of 1936–38. This book covers every one of those years, and it is where the concealment in this series is densest.
Get the date right first. The spine reads 1985, and it belongs to the year Gorbachev became General Secretary, before glasnost had opened anything. But the text is older. The copyright page carries "© Издательство «Мысль», 1981" above "English translation © Progress Publishers 1985" — so the Russian original was closed in 1981, in the last full year of Brezhnev, and reached English readers four years later with nothing altered. The internal evidence agrees: the latest datable Soviet authority the book leans on is the 1956 Central Committee resolution Overcoming the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, and the freshest political horizon is Brezhnev's, whose name sits in the index and whose "developed socialism" framing governs the closing pages. This is a document of the Brezhnev settlement on the past, not of the moment it was printed in — which matters, because the Brezhnev settlement is precisely a settlement about how much of the 1930s a Soviet reader was allowed to be told.
It is a genuinely large collective work. The USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of the International Working-Class Movement put some sixty named historians to it — a basic team of authors and a further sixty-odd contributors, each carrying a kandidat or doktor degree — under an editorial board headed by S. S. Salychev, whose name, like several others on the board, is printed inside the black mourning rules that mark a man who died before his book appeared. Above them stands the same General Editorial Committee that signed the earlier volumes, and its first line is the one to note: "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 twenty-one-page article in Kommunist — "Trotskyism, Weapon of Anti-Communism" — instructing the Party's "theoretical and propagandist cadres" to expose Trotskyism's "kinship with open anti-Communism, with opportunism of right and 'left' persuasions," scare quotes and all. The book whose chairman wrote that directive is the book under review, and the directive is legible in it.
The volume runs from 1924 to 1945 — from the year of Lenin's death and the beginning of the drive to build "socialism in one country" to the victory over Germany; "those twenty years to which this volume is devoted," in its own phrase. It is built in three parts: the USSR as builder of the first socialist society; the class battles of the working class in the capitalist countries through the Depression, the fascist seizures of power and the Popular Front; and the national-liberation movements of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The word "opportunism" and its cognates, which peak at nearly thirteen uses per ten thousand words in the 1905–17 volume of this series, have fallen here to about 1.9 — a period instrument, quieting as the narrative leaves the founding split of Bolshevism behind. The interesting things in this volume are not in its word-counts. They are in what it narrates fully, what it narrates in a whisper, and what it does not narrate at all.
Begin where the book is most confident, because that is where the silence is loudest. Collectivisation gets a full and celebratory account. The volume takes it back to "Lenin's cooperative plan" and the Fifteenth Party Congress of December 1927, describes the twenty-five thousand industrial workers sent to the villages, and reports the pace with pride: at the end of 1929 "the nation-wide collectivisation of agriculture began," and "In October–December of 1929, 2,400,000 peasant holdings and in January–February 1930, almost 10,000,000 holdings joined collective farms." The kulaks (well-to-do peasants) are dealt with in the same register. The task, the book says, was "eliminating the kulaks as a class, the class which constituted the largest group of exploiters," and the outcome was clean: their resistance was "of a sporadic, localised nature and were quickly checked," and "The resistance of the kulaks was broken by the joint efforts of the working class and the rural poor in close cooperation with the middle peasants."
What is missing from those sentences is the dying. The forced collectivisation of 1929–33 and the famine it produced across Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga and Kazakhstan killed several million people — the historiography is genuinely contested and the estimates range widely, but they are counted in the millions, and the deportation of the dekulakised to the north and to Central Asia is not in serious dispute. None of it is here. The word "famine" occurs zero times in the volume. Dekulakisation as deportation is absent; the "excesses" that even Stalin conceded in his March 1930 retreat, "Dizzy with Success," are absent; the year 1933 appears constantly, but never in Ukraine.
The demonstration that this is a choice and not a period limitation is that the book is fluent in famine when the victims are someone else's. The words "hunger" and "starvation" occur more than two dozen times, and every one of them describes the capitalist West in the Depression: the "queues and hunger" of the early 1930s, the "hunger marches" of the unemployed, "starvation (despite the existence of huge unused supplies of food)," "seeing one's children starving." The vocabulary of mass hunger was fully available to these authors. They spent it entirely on Chicago and Berlin, and kept none of it for the Soviet countryside in the same years. A book that can write "starvation despite huge unused supplies of food" about the United States in 1932, and cannot write the word "famine" about the USSR in 1933, has told you exactly where its instrument is switched off.
The volume covers 1936, 1937 and 1938 in great detail — they are the years of the Popular Front and the Spanish war, which are its core. So the Great Terror falls squarely inside its dates, and its handling is the sharpest test in the series. The result is not total silence. It is something more precisely calibrated: the Terror is admitted, once, in the exact language the 1956 Central Committee resolution licensed, and then sealed.
The admission runs like this. "Stalin's cult of personality was detrimental to the cause of socialist construction, as was the resulting infringement of the Leninist standards of public life and socialist democracy." And, more analytically than one expects: when socialism "had already emerged victorious," Stalin "put forward the erroneous tenet to the effect that during the further advance of the USSR along the socialist path the class struggle would intensify. In practice this mistaken tenet was used to justify the violations of socialist legality and mass repressions." That is the single most candid sentence in the book — it names the theoretical rationale that powered the Terror. And it is immediately closed off: "However, these violations of the Leninist standards of party and state life, despite their grim consequences, could not change the very nature of socialist society." Every mention is stamped with the same seal. The "negative consequences of the Stalin cult nonetheless did not alter the socialist essence of the Soviet social system."
Now count what the formula leaves out. There are no Moscow Trials in this book — the phrase occurs zero times, as do "show trial," "Great Terror," "enemies of the people." There is no perpetrator: Yezhov zero, Yagoda zero, the NKVD's machinery unnamed. There is no victim: not one of the men shot after the three great trials is linked to his death. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky all appear — but only in the 1920s, as the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc" and the Bukharin–Rykov group "routed" and expelled at the Fifteenth Congress of 1927. They enter as defeated oppositionists and they simply vanish; the reader is never told that Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936, that Bukharin and Rykov were shot in March 1938, that Tomsky killed himself ahead of the first trial. Pyatakov, Radek and Christian Rakovsky — the second and third trials' defendants — do not appear at all. Marshal Tukhachevsky and the decapitation of the Red Army officer corps in June 1937 are absent to the letter. Sergei Kirov, whose assassination in December 1934 was the pretext for the whole apparatus of terror, is a single page-reference in the index, deep in the war chapters; the eight times "Kirov" appears in the text it is the Kirov tank works. The victims of the Terror are "some people," and the number is never given.
There is one concrete instance of repression the book will name, and it is worth dwelling on because it tells you where the line runs. Among the "adverse circumstances" of the cult, the volume lists "unjustified repression of some people in the international communist movement and the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland." The dissolution of the KPP in 1938 — its leaders summoned to Moscow and shot — is a real event, correctly identified. It can be named because it happened to a foreign party. The Institute's own voice can reach a catastrophe in Warsaw's émigré leadership that it cannot reach in its own Politburo. The constraint is not on the topic of repression; the same paragraph handles repression. It is on the Institute's proximity to the subject.
It would be a mistake, and this series has learned to guard against it, to convict the book of a candour it does keep. This volume records its own side erring, and does so more than once. The "cult of personality" is conceded. Stalin's "erroneous tenet" is named as his. And on the Comintern's ultraleft "Third Period," the book is genuinely and usefully self-critical: it reports that "the assessment of social democracy as social fascism became widespread," calls it a "schematic, sectarian approach," records that Clara Zetkin "came out with a consistently argued attack against the left extremist distortions of the united-front policy" and "objected to the use of the term 'social-fascism'," and credits Georgi Dimitrov's July 1934 letter proposing to review "former assessments of social democracy, especially the notion of social fascism." That is a real concession, made in the book's own voice, about the line that helped hand Germany to Hitler.
So the reflexivity test — the one this series trusts above frequency counts — has to be put in its sharpened form. The question is not whether the book can admit an error; it plainly can. The question is whether the category ever turns inward. It does not. Stalin is allowed a "mistaken tenet"; he is never an opportunist. The Comintern is allowed "left extremist distortions" and a "sectarian approach"; the disqualifying nouns — opportunism, adventurism, capitulation — are never spent on the Party's own line. They are reserved, entire, for the man who left. Trotsky's is a "notorious policy"; the opposition is "capitulationist"; Trotskyism is "adventurist," "anti-Leninist," a current "undeniably playing into the hands of the international bourgeoisie." A Bolshevik who stayed inside may be wrong on a theory, a vote, a slogan, and the book will say so. Nobody who stayed inside is ever called an opportunist. That is the finding, and it is not about how often a word is used.
The self-criticism on "social fascism" sharpens the point rather than blunting it, because of who said it first. The volume admits, in 1981, that the Third Period line was a disastrous sectarian error that split the German working class before Hitler. Trotsky said exactly that between 1930 and 1933, in real time, in the Bulletin of the Opposition — "The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany" (September 1930), "For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism" (December 1931), and after the collapse, "The German Catastrophe" (28 May 1933). For saying it when it could still have mattered, he was an "adventurist." The Institute reached his conclusion half a century later and kept the epithet on the man who reached it first. The book can adopt the analysis; it cannot rehabilitate the analyst.
Trotsky the man is named five times in 319,000 words; "Trotskyism" and "Trotskyite" carry the rest of the forty-odd mentions. The doctrine attributed to him is stated in a single formula, in scare quotes: the opposition "started out from Trotsky's notorious policy of 'permanent revolution', according to which only the victory of revolution world-wide could save the Land of the Soviets from the restoration of capitalist relations." Elsewhere he "maintained that it was impossible to build socialism in the USSR without 'direct state support' by the Western proletariat," and "proposed the adventurist course of prodding the world revolution by all and every means, not excluding that of war."
Apply the citation test this series has now run on three prior volumes. Does the book cite Trotsky to his own works, or only characterise him? It only characterises him. Across every one of those forty mentions there is not a single footnote to anything Trotsky wrote. The phrases inside the quotation marks are sourced to nothing; the refutations around them are sourced to Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, to the resolutions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses, and to Comintern documents. The index entry reads "Trotskyi, L. D. — 27, 40, 150, 714": three pages of text and the index itself. This is exactly the pattern of the 1905–17 volume, where no work by Trotsky was cited once and the doctrine attributed to him sat in quotation marks with no source. An opponent who is quoted can be checked; an opponent who is only characterised cannot, and that is the point of characterising him.
The characterisation is also, on its own terms, a caricature that the record will not bear. "Socialism in one country" is presented throughout as settled Leninism — "Socialism in one country never was and never remained socialism for one country," the book affirms — and "permanent revolution" as its adventurist antithesis, a demand to prod world revolution by war. The theory the book will not state is stated at length in works this project holds: Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1930) on the growing-over of the democratic into the socialist revolution and the alliance with the peasantry, and above all 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 direct contemporaneous answer to the doctrine this volume treats as Lenin's own. A reader who wants to know what was actually argued, rather than what the argument was said to be, has the texts; the Institute had them too.
Spain is one of the volume's largest subjects — the Popular Front, the war, the International Brigades, the solidarity of the world's workers all run through it. And its treatment of the POUM is a small masterpiece of the operation. The party is named twice. Once, neutrally, as a signatory of the Popular Front Pact of 15 January 1936. And once as a wrecker: "In Catalonia and Aragon Anarchists and Trotskyists from POUM pushed ahead with forced 'collectivisation' in the countryside, socialised small enterprises needlessly and pursued a policy of 'self-government', thus creating utter chaos and confusion." What the book does not report is what was done to them: the May Days of 1937, the suppression of the POUM, and the abduction and murder of its leader Andrés Nin by Soviet security agents in June 1937. Nin does not appear in the volume.
Read the POUM sentence beside the collectivisation chapters and the whole method stands exposed. Forced "collectivisation" in Catalonia, in quotation marks, is "chaos and confusion." Forced collectivisation in Ukraine, without quotation marks, is the victory of socialism. The same act carries opposite verdicts depending on who is doing it and whether the doer is inside the genealogy. The contemporaneous reply is Trotsky's "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning" (17 December 1937), written in the Bulletin as the POUM was being destroyed, which argues that the Popular Front's subordination of the revolution to the liberal republic was the cause of the defeat the book blames on the revolutionaries.
On foreign policy the volume tells the honourable-USSR story with real skill: the tireless Soviet campaign for "collective security" in the League of Nations, the mutual-assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935, and the betrayal at Munich, which the book invokes more than two dozen times as the West's abdication. Then the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is named, correctly dated, and defended: "the Soviet government was compelled to conclude the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939," justified through a later quotation from Marshal Zhukov that "the pact did not deliver the USSR from the menace of fascist aggression" but bought time. What the account omits is the Secret Additional Protocol signed the same night, which partitioned Poland and assigned Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the Soviet sphere — and with it the character of what happened next. The volume carries a section titled "The Socialist Revolutions of 1940 in the Baltic Region," in which Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, "the weakest links in the world capitalist system," pass to socialism through the ripening of "all socio-political contradictions" and "the influence of the victory of socialism in the USSR." The Red Army, which entered under the protocol the book does not mention, is not in the sentence. A revolution that arrived in someone else's tanks is narrated as a revolution that rose from within.
Our own tradition is not owed a free pass here, and it did not give itself one. The Fourth International was divided on the 1939–40 events and said so in the open; the point of citing it is not that it was unanimous but that its disputes are legible, which is the difference the whole series turns on.
None of this should persuade a reader that the volume is worthless, because it is not, and a reader told so would be badly misled. Three things in it are of real value.
The first is the self-criticism of the Third Period already described. It is more than most Soviet books of its date would risk: it names Zetkin's contemporary objection, credits Dimitrov's correction, and concedes that the "social fascism" formula "provided the opponents of unity with arguments to use to discredit the efforts of Communists." On the greatest strategic disaster in Comintern history, the book tells much of the truth.
The second is the comparative labour history of the capitalist countries in the Depression, which is the bulk of Part Two and is serious work. The account of mass unemployment — the hunger marches, the wage series traced across four countries and two decades, the movement of the unemployed built "from the very onset of the crisis" — is documented from a wide, largely non-Russian source base: Swedish, French, Danish and German monographs and memoirs cited by title and page. The country-by-country narrative of the fascist seizures and the Popular Front response, and the third part on the working classes of Asia, Africa and Latin America, give English readers material that was not otherwise reaching them in 1985. This is the same institute that produced the outstanding colonial chapters of the earlier volumes, and the craft is intact.
The third is the honest structural observation that the book's virtues and its silences are the same fact seen twice. The Popular Front is both this volume's subject and its alibi. The book can be candid about the "social fascism" error precisely because the Popular Front is the Party correcting itself — the error has a happy ending, and an error that the movement itself overcame is safe to print. And it is that same anti-fascist frame, the movement of 1935–39 as an ascending story of unity and heroism, that makes the Terror and the murder of Nin unprintable: you cannot narrate the Popular Front years as a triumph of proletarian solidarity while also narrating that in those exact years Moscow was shooting the Old Bolsheviks and its agents were killing revolutionaries in Barcelona. The concealment is not a set of separate lies. It is the cost of the frame.
For this decade the anti-Stalinist left left the fullest contemporaneous record it ever produced, and it is held in this project.
On the great theoretical charge — "socialism in one country" against "permanent revolution" — read The Third International After Lenin (1928), part I, and The Permanent Revolution (1930), against the caricature the book supplies without a source.
On the German catastrophe and the "social fascism" line the volume now half-repudiates, read Trotsky's real-time argument in the Bulletin of the Opposition: "The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany" (September 1930), "For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism" (December 1931), and "The German Catastrophe" (28 May 1933). The book's belated verdict is his contemporaneous one.
On collectivisation, the bureaucracy and the "cult," the standing answer is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written while this volume's events were current — chapter 5, "The Soviet Thermidor," on the rise of the bureaucratic caste, and chapter 10, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution," the direct reply to the 1936 Stalin Constitution the volume treats as the charter of achieved socialism.
On the Terror and the trials, read The Revolution Betrayed alongside Trotsky's warnings written before the first trial — "Bolshevik-Leninists in USSR Face New Frame-Up" (31 March 1935) and "Stalin Plans Wholesale Persecution" (25 March 1936) — and the verdict of the international commission of inquiry chaired by John Dewey, published as Not Guilty (1938), which examined the Moscow evidence the book cannot mention and found it fabricated. On the Kirov assassination that opened the whole sequence and which this volume erases, Max Shachtman's "Behind the Kirov Assassination" appeared in The New International for January 1935 — while Shachtman was still inside the orthodox Trotskyist movement, five years before the 1940 split that took him out of it. On the destruction of the Red Army command that the volume passes over in silence, Trotsky's "The Decapitation of the Red Army," from Bulletin nos. 56–57 (July–August 1937), was reprinted in Intercontinental Press, vol. 8, no. 9, 9 March 1970.
On Spain and the POUM, read "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning" (17 December 1937) against the two sentences the book allows the POUM.
The introduction to the 1905–17 volume in this series concluded that the Institute's constraint was not chronological but genealogical — that within a single book, at a single moment, the section on a Chilean printer could be free while the section on the chairman of the first Soviet could not, and that what determined which was distance from the Party's own line of descent. This volume confirms the finding and adds a wrinkle to it. Here the constraint is legible not as distance in space but as distance in register. The book can name a foreign catastrophe (the Communist Party of Poland) and not a domestic one; it can admit an error the movement itself corrected (social fascism) and not one it never disowned (the Terror, the famine); it can rehabilitate Stalin as the war-leader of 1941–45, chairing the State Defence Committee, and in the same volume file his cult under the 1956 resolution and move on. What is free is the craft, the foreign subject, the corrected mistake. What is not free is the Institute's own voice on the Soviet 1930s, and the name of the man who described those years as they happened.
So read this book the way its own structure asks to be read. The Depression chapters, the Popular Front narrative and the colonial third part are real labour history, and the self-criticism of the Third Period is a document worth having. Then read the chapters on the building of socialism knowing that a famine has been removed from them, that the men tried and shot between 1936 and 1938 walk out of the narrative in 1927 and never return, and that the one figure who reported all of it in real time is present only as a doctrine in quotation marks with nothing behind them.