The sixth volume is where the series finally reaches its own present, and something changes on the title page before a word of the history is read. The first three volumes were produced by the USSR Academy of Sciences through its Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, the body set up in 1966 to write exactly this history. This volume is credited to a different institute of the same Academy: the Institute of World Economy and International Relations — IMEMO, the Academy's establishment for the study of the capitalist world — with N. N. Inozemtsev named on the page as editor-in-chief and a team led by G. G. Diligensky, K. G. Kholodkovsky and S. P. Peregudov. The General Editorial Committee is unchanged and still spans all seven volumes: B. N. Ponomarev as chairman, T. T. Timofeyev and A. I. Sobolev as his deputies, with Zagladin, Fedoseyev and the rest of the twenty-odd names that signed Volume One. The subject has passed from the historians of the labour movement to the specialists in Western capitalism, and it shows: this is the most empirical book in the series and, on its polemical surface, the least strident. Both facts have the same cause, and it is worth being precise about what that cause is.
Establish the date of the text before anything else, because the spine is the most misleading thing about this book. The Russian subtitle names the coverage exactly — The Working-Class Movement of the Developed Capitalist Countries after the Second World War (1945–1979) — and the internal evidence dates the manuscript to the turn of that decade, not to 1987. The document the volume treats as its standing authority is the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU of February 1981, quoted and footnoted a dozen times ("Documents and Resolutions. The 26th Congress of the CPSU"); the narrative of events runs out in 1980 — the British steel strike of "early 1980", the Swedish general strike of "the spring of 1980", "the victory of the Republican Reagan at the 1980 presidential elections", the Italian local elections of June 1980. A handful of footnotes reach a little further: one records that in "1983–1984 the Socialist-led government" in France "went over to the policy of 'austerity'", forcing the Communists out of it, and the bibliography carries imprints as late as 1985. Only in the introduction does a later date surface: there the authors invoke "the new edition of the Party Programme adopted by the 27th Congress" — the congress of February–March 1986, Gorbachev's first as General Secretary. So the shape of the object is a late-Brezhnev manuscript, substantially closed around 1980–81, lightly refreshed through the mid-decade, its front matter updated to salute the 27th Congress, and issued in English in 1987 — the second full year of perestroika and glasnost.
That gap is the whole story of this volume, and it can be read off the page with a single set of searches. 1987 was the year Soviet historians began, publicly and under official cover, to reopen what had been sealed: the year the rehabilitation of Bukharin was being argued in the press, the year Ogonyok and Moscow News printed what had been unprintable, the year the phrase "blank spots" entered the language of Soviet history. None of it is here. Gorbachev, perestroika, glasnost, Chernobyl, Bukharin, rehabilitation, "blank spots" — every one of these returns zero across 288,000 words. This is not a book that shows the first cracks of glasnost; it is a book that glasnost has not reached, wearing a jacket printed after glasnost had begun. What it says about the international labour movement it says in the voice of 1980, and the interesting question is what that voice can and cannot do when the subject is the movement's own crisis, which by 1980 was well advanced and which this book was written inside of.
Start with the vocabulary, because this series has taught its readers to count it. In the third volume the word opportunism and its cognates occurred 383 times, 12.9 per 10,000 words, the densest in the entire catalogue; here it occurs nineteen times, 0.66 per 10,000, the sparsest of the six. The collapse is real and it is not evidence of anything by itself — a companion study in this project retracted the argument from frequency to ritual on the good ground that Lenin scores higher on the same measure than the Progress volumes do, and a historian of the post-war West has less occasion to write "opportunism" than a historian of the Second International's collapse. What the low count actually conceals is a substitution. The classifier doing the work in this volume is reformism, which appears 233 times, with revisionism (22) and centrism (25) behind it; and its target is almost always Social Democracy, the party of the reformist "compromise" and the "consolidation of opportunist trends in the labour movement". The apparatus has not been dismantled. It has been retrained on the nearer enemy.
The question this series exists to ask is not how often the word is used but whether the category it names can ever be turned on the speaker — whether error is admitted only in others or also at home. In the first five volumes the answer was uniform: error was freely admitted, but the disqualifying category never turned inward. A Soviet volume appearing in 1987, contemporaneous for the first time with its subject's own crisis, is the single place in the catalogue where that might change. It comes closer here than anywhere else in the series, and it does not cross.
It comes closer because this book, alone among the six, says out loud that something went wrong in the Soviet-led movement. It names "the impact of the Stalin personality cult and ... the violation of the Leninist norms of party life". It concedes that the Cominform — the "Informbureau" — worked under conditions that "affected some of the assessments and conclusions it made", and that when it excommunicated the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1948 this "led to a prolonged isolation of the party from the international communist movement and did harm to the latter". It even allows that the Twentieth Congress of 1956 "exposed the Stalin personality cult and its consequences". Set beside the earlier volumes, in which the name Stalin occurred zero times, this is a genuine loosening, and it should be credited as one. Error is on the page.
But it is the error of 1956, not of 1987, and the difference is decisive. "Personality cult" is the Khrushchevite formula, and its function is precisely to localise the whole catastrophe in one man's character and stop — to name a defect without naming a system. The book does exactly that. The cult is Stalin's; "the violation of the Leninist norms" is a lapse subsequently corrected; the Cominform's crime was an "error" of "assessment". At no point is a critical political category — not opportunism, not revisionism, not bureaucracy — attached to the CPSU or the Soviet state. Those words are reserved, as ever, for others: for Social Democracy; for Earl Browder, whose "right-wing opportunist policy" the CPUSA is praised for repudiating in 1945; for the "'left' revisionists", meaning the Chinese; for the "ultra-left anarchist, Trotskyite and other similar groups" who, in the volume's single use of the word in 288,000 words, "assumed the leadership in the student movement" in May 1968 and conducted "unremitting propaganda against the Communist Party and the CGT". The mirror is never turned. Error is admissible; the category is not. The reflexivity test does not break in 1987, and that non-event, in the second year of glasnost, is the most important thing this volume records about itself.
Where the constraint becomes visible is not in what the book says but in the two events it will not name, both of which are load-bearing for its own subject. The book is a history of the Western labour movement, and the two moments that most shaped the Western communist parties between 1945 and 1980 were the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 — the events that drove members out by the hundred thousand and that, in the Italian and Spanish parties, produced the whole phenomenon later called Eurocommunism. Neither invasion appears. Hungary occurs three times: as a founder member of the Cominform, as the venue of a 1949 Informbureau meeting, and inside a list of socialist states. Czechoslovakia occurs five times: the Cominform again, the Karlovy Vary security conference of 1967, Prague as a place of publication, the 1949 peace congress, the 1978 world trade-union congress. "Prague Spring", Dubček, "socialism with a human face", Nagy, Kádár — all zero. The year 1956 does appear in the book at the point where it matters most, and what it means there is Suez: "The USSR responded resolutely and without hesitation to the aggression unleashed by Britain, France and Israel against Egypt in 1956, compelling the aggressors in a very short period to abandon their military action." In the paragraph nearest the Hungarian revolution, 1956 is the year the Soviet Union heroically stopped an imperialist war — not the year Soviet tanks entered Budapest. The nearest the book comes to the actual events is a single sentence of pure abstraction: "The imperialists and reactionaries were attempting to use forces hostile to socialism still to be found in some of the socialist countries, and also the mistakes and miscalculations made in the course of socialist construction ... These attempts failed completely." "Mistakes and miscalculations" can be admitted; a country, a date, a tank cannot.
The same suppression governs the treatment of Eurocommunism, and here it takes the form of a set of missing names. The book covers the Western communist parties in detail and with evident sympathy. It follows the Italian party's "historic compromise" through the Fourteenth Congress of 1975; it narrates the French party's electoral fortunes and Georges Marchais's 15.4 per cent in 1974; it devotes pages to the Portuguese party under Álvaro Cunhal and the Spanish party's emergence from the Franco years. Yet Berlinguer — Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1972 and the author of the very "historic compromise" the book discusses — never appears. Nor does Carrillo: Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish party, who in 1977 published "Eurocomunismo" y Estado and was denounced for it by name in the Soviet press. The word Eurocommunism itself occurs nowhere. In the Spanish chapter the book names Dolores Ibarruri, the party's ceremonial president — "Dolores Ibarruri, President of the Communist Party of Spain, became a Deputy for a mining constituency in Asturias" — and omits the general secretary who actually ran it and who had made himself an enemy in Moscow. The pattern is exact and it recurs across the series: the Moscow-loyal figurehead is named, the heretic who criticised the USSR is unpersoned. The book can describe every effect of the Eurocommunist turn — the national roads, the parliamentary strategy, the compromise policies, even the falling membership — while suppressing its cause, which was these parties' recoil from Soviet tanks in Prague. It presents their autonomy as flowing from the wisdom of the Twentieth Congress, "peaceful coexistence as a special form of class struggle" and the discovery that "the passage to socialism occurs in a variety of forms" — never as a breach with Moscow. The word anti-Sovietism does not occur, because the thing it would have to describe cannot be allowed onto the page.
None of that should be allowed to bury what is genuinely good in this book, and a reader told the whole thing is apparatus would be badly misled. Underneath the framing chapters is a substantial and honestly documented comparative history of the post-war Western working class, and it is the best sustained empirical writing in the series after the colonial chapters of Volume Three. The middle chapters — on the changing social structure of the class, on wages and unemployment, on consumption, on the strike wave of the late 1960s and 1970s, on the trade unions — work from Western sources and cite them openly: Labour Party and Trades Union Congress conference reports, OECD manpower statistics, United Nations national-accounts yearbooks, Thorez's memoirs, the French party's own Histoire, the collective agreements of the Scandinavian federations. The account of the 1974 FIAT lay-offs, when "together with the car workers the whole of Turin came out on strike, forcing the administration to back down", is specific and unsentimental; so is the reckoning of the 1980 Swedish lockout, when "about a million people took part in the greatest labour dispute in the country's history" and "85 per cent of all industrial enterprises were shut down". The sociology of the "foreign workers", the office proletariat and the semi-proletarian strata is careful and undogmatic, and the book resists the temptation — to which the earlier volumes sometimes yielded — to collapse every gain into the account of the proletariat as such. This is IMEMO doing what IMEMO was good at: the close, comparative, statistically grounded study of developed capitalism. Read chapters 4 through 9 as the serious labour history they are.
Where should a reader go for the other side — for the two events the book cannot name and the movement it cannot describe? For once the timing is generous, because the anti-Stalinist left answered these things as they happened, and its journal of record for the period began publishing in the very year the book erases. The International Socialist Review of the American Socialist Workers Party — on this series' own side of the 1940 and 1953 splits — opened its life in 1956 with issues titled "The Poznan Uprising" and, that autumn, "Revolution in Poland and Hungary". Its editors wrote, while the fighting was still going on, that "the Polish and Hungarian workers launched a general revolutionary uprising against the rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy", that what "manifested at the summits of Soviet society in the Twentieth Congress was the result of the deep stirrings of the revolutionary workers", and — flatly, against the Progress volume's Suez — that "the Kremlin's army is entering Budapest once again ... The Nagy government has been arrested. A Kremlin puppet government has been appointed." That is the same year, the same country, from the tradition this series speaks for; the difference between "mistakes and miscalculations ... These attempts failed completely" and "a general revolutionary uprising against the rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy" is the difference the book exists to obscure. (International Socialist Review, vol. 17 no. 4, Fall 1956, pp. 111–112.)
For Eurocommunism, the reply is Ernest Mandel's A Critique of Eurocommunism (NLB, 1978), which is built around precisely the men this book will not name — Berlinguer, Carrillo, Marchais — and which argues, from their own texts, what the Progress volume needs its readers never to notice: that their turn was a response to Soviet reality, not a gift from the Twentieth Congress. For the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence as a special form of class struggle" that the book derives from the Twentieth Congress and treats as self-evidently benign, Mandel's "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution" (International Socialist Review, vol. 31 no. 2, March–April 1970) traces the phrase's real history back through Brest-Litovsk and the Comintern. And for the theoretical frame beneath all of it — the conception of the Soviet order that "personality cult" was designed to prevent anyone forming — there is the book this series takes as its standard, Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), whose ninth chapter states the thing the Progress volume spends a paragraph avoiding: "The Soviet bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat politically in order by methods of its own to defend the social conquests." A book that can name Stalin's personality but not the stratum that outlived him has told you where its limit is.
That limit is the same one the first volume's introduction identified and the third confirmed: not chronological but genealogical, the distance of a fact from the party's own line of descent. What is new in the sixth volume is only that the fact and the party have finally arrived in the same decade, so that the constraint operates not on the distant past but on the living present of the movement the book is describing — on Budapest, on Prague, on Berlinguer, on the crisis these authors were sitting inside as they wrote. And what is newest, and saddest, is the date on the spine. A book that could not name 1956 or 1968 was being sent out to English readers in 1987, at the exact moment the country that commissioned it had begun, at last and too late, to name them itself. The jacket is a Gorbachev jacket; the book is a Brezhnev book; and the year between them is the measure of how much a serious institute of the Academy of Sciences could see of its own world and still not be permitted to say.