The companion volume to this one carried a trap on its copyright page. Vassily Krapivin's What Is Dialectical Materialism?, No. 6 in the same series, has 1987 on the spine and "First printing 1985 / Second printing 1987" inside: a Gorbachev-era jacket over a Brezhnev-era text. Expecting the same here is the obvious move, and it is wrong. The copyright page of this book reads "© Издательство «Прогресс», 1985" and "English translation © Progress Publishers 1985", with the Soviet imprint code ending 014(01)-85, and it records no printing history at all. Our catalogue lists a 1987 printing; no copy of one has been seen for this edition, and nothing in the text we hold supports dating it later than 1985.
That matters less here than it did for Krapivin, because this book can be dated from the inside with unusual precision. The latest event it cites is the plenary meeting of the CPSU Central Committee of December 1983, invoked on the environment. Its freshest statistic is from 1982. Its most recent Party landmark is the Twenty-Sixth Congress of 1981. It describes the Soviet Constitution as "the epitome of all that has been reached during the sixty years of Soviet government" — a 1977 sentence, still standing. And it uses the phrase "developed socialism" eighteen times, a formula that was the organising concept of Soviet self-description under Brezhnev and that the Twenty-Seventh Congress of February 1986 quietly retired. This is a manuscript closed in 1984 and printed in 1985.
So the nil returns on perestroika, glasnost, Gorbachev and Chernobyl are chronology, not findings, and are not offered as findings. None of those things had happened. What the date does establish is the reverse: this is the last full statement of the doctrine before the doctrine was opened up — the position from which Soviet social theory was about to have to move.
Three authors are named — Zoya Berbeshkina, Lyudmila Yakovleva, Dmitry Zerkin — and the book supplies nothing whatever about them: no affiliation, no note, no division of labour between the eleven chapters. What it does supply is the machinery around them. The series editorial board is printed in full: F. M. Volkov as chief editor, Ye. F. Gubsky as deputy, and F. M. Burlatsky, V. V. Krapivin, Yu. N. Popov, V. V. Sobolev, F. N. Yurlov and V. D. Zotov. Krapivin, who wrote No. 6, sits on the board that commissioned No. 7. This is not a book by three scholars so much as a slot in a curriculum, filled.
The curriculum is worth reading off the back cover, because it is Plekhanov's. The ABC of Social and Political Knowledge runs to twenty numbered titles, of which No. 4 is What Is Philosophy?, No. 5 What Is Scientific Communism?, No. 6 What Is Dialectical Materialism? and No. 7 this one. That is precisely the tripartite division of Marxist theory that Plekhanov established and that George Novack sets out in "Sociology and Historical Materialism" — dialectical materialism as the general account of reality, historical materialism as its application to society, scientific socialism as its application to capitalism's supersession — with catalogue numbers attached. Hold that thought; it returns.
One expectation carried over from the companion volume is refuted here, and the refutation is worth reporting. Krapivin's Foreword thanked the Cuban Party's Inner-Party Education Department, the MPLA and FRELIMO and two African party schools, and his book was correspondingly de-nationalised: "Soviet Union" twice, "USSR" three times, "CPSU" once, in sixty-four thousand words. This volume's Foreword thanks nobody and names no commissioning body. It opens on "Millions of people in all parts of the world" and stops. And it is not de-nationalised at all: in fifty-nine thousand words, "Soviet Union" occurs twenty-three times, "USSR" twenty-one, "CPSU" three. The USSR is present on almost every doctrinal question as the worked case. The copy scanned for this edition even carries an American distributor's stamp on the back cover, a Chicago address on West Ohio Street, partly destroyed by the scanner. Whatever the two books shared, they were not aimed at the same room. Cuba is still here — thirteen mentions, alongside Angola, Vietnam and Ethiopia — but so, unmistakably, is Moscow.
It would be easy and dishonest to go straight to the failures. Over long stretches this is competent teaching, and in two places it is better than that.
The section on society and nature is the best thing in the book. It concedes, without being forced to, that "Even under socialism, the problem of environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources may become very serious." It then gives an accurate, non-ideological account of transboundary pollution: British industry built extra-high smokestacks so that waste would not fall where it was made, southerly winds carried the smoke to Scandinavia, and "Fish have died there in hundreds of lakes and rivers, the growth of forests has been retarded, and the soil, which was never very rich, has become still poorer." That is acid rain described correctly in a Soviet primer of 1985, with the conclusion drawn that "No country is secure from the threat of pollution even if it has no developed industry of its own." A student would learn something true from it.
The treatment of population is also better than its reputation. The authors distinguish carefully between a demographic problem and a Malthusian explanation of it, concede that providing food, energy and work for a growing population is genuinely hard — "Great difficulties often arise" — and then insist that world hunger "is essentially the harsh legacy of colonialism and the result of the policies" of the powers that imposed it. One may think that too simple; it is not a stupid position, and it is argued rather than asserted.
The philosophical spine is honestly taught in places. The chapter on objective laws opens on the real question — "May one recognise that history is governed by objective laws and also recognise man's conscious (free) activity?" — and answers it with a distinction most undergraduate courses fail to make: "Necessity should not be confused with inevitability." The section on the subjective factor grants that "Under certain conditions, the subjective factor may even play a determining role", and names the opposite error accurately: "Ignoring the subjective factor is characteristic of vulgar (one-sided, unscientific) economic materialism." It even admits that "Socialism also knows spontaneous processes (like the unpredictable results of individual economic decisions or the consequences of outside conditions)". These are real concessions inside a determinist framework and they are the marks of someone who has taught the material to students who asked questions.
The apparatus is honest in one respect that deserves crediting, because the series has learned not to assume it. The book's fifty-odd footnotes go overwhelmingly to Lenin and to Marx and Engels in the Collected Works, as expected — but the one non-Marxist source it attacks at length it also cites properly: "Z. Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, The Viking Press, New York, 1970, p. XIV." That is a real reference a reader can check.
The failures are not scattered. They cluster at exactly one point, and the point is the one that makes this volume more interesting than its companion. Dialectical materialism is a doctrine about nature; you can teach it for three hundred pages without ever meeting the society you live in. Historical materialism is a doctrine about society, written by people living in a society, and the test it cannot avoid is whether its own categories are allowed to point homeward.
The house formulation of that test is exact: error is admissible; the category is not. This book proves the formulation, because it does concede errors. It admits socialist spontaneity, socialist environmental damage, "non-antagonistic contradictions" under socialism which "cannot be dismissed", and the persistence of individualism after the revolution. What it never does is let a classification turn inward.
Start with the single most important word. In fifty-nine thousand words on society, the state, classes and political organisation, the word bureaucracy occurs exactly once. (A naive search returns zero, because the scan breaks it across a line as "bu- / reaucracy"; the hyphenation has been closed silently here and throughout, and where a quotation runs across a page the scanner's running head and page number have been removed from it. Nothing else in any quotation has been altered.) Here is the one occurrence, from the chapter on the state:
First to be destroyed are institutions protecting the old, exploiter social order, such as the bureaucracy and the law-enforcement agencies.
Bureaucracy enters this book solely as a feature of the state the revolution demolishes. It is not a risk, not a tendency, not a category available for use. Privilege appears four times: a caste of priests in Ancient Egypt, class privileges in Britain, the lost privileges of expropriated exploiters, and a world outlook as "the privilege of every person". Inequality appears ten times, distributed across primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalist nations and bourgeois law — and not once inside socialism. These are not silences of the kind that could be explained by a page limit. They are the shape of a vocabulary built so that certain sentences cannot be formed in it.
The same architecture governs the treatment of the state. The book defines "political regime" in general terms, as "the set of methods used in exercising power, showing the extent to which democratic rights and freedoms are realised" — a category that plainly applies to any state whatever. It then supplies the taxonomy: "The regimes prevalent in contemporary bourgeois states are: parliamentary, military dictatorial, fascist, semi-fascist, and so on." No socialist regime types are offered, because on this account a socialist state has a class essence and therefore does not need a regime analysis. The USSR's own political system is given instead as a list of four institutions, headed by "the socialist state of all the people" with "the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the core of the Soviet political system)" second.
And the withering away of the state, which in Lenin is a function of internal social development, is here made hostage to something else entirely:
From this it follows that the state will not wither away before the correlation of forces in the world is so much in favour of socialism that there will no longer be a threat of aggression against the socialist countries.
That is a promise with an external escape clause attached, and the clause has no expiry date.
The method has a still sharper form. The book states, as a general law, that "It has been proved historically that external politics is a continuation of internal politics. States behave on the international scene much the same way as their ruling classes do at home." It is a good law, and it is Marxist. It is then applied in one direction only: "This holds true for contemporary bourgeois states, and notably for US imperialism." Two pages later the authors write that "The absence in socialist society of social antagonisms, generating war, and of classes whose interest lies in war and the arms race is reflected in the socialist countries' foreign policy of peace and friendship among nations." That sentence was written and set in Moscow at some point in 1984, more than four years after the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan. Afghanistan occurs nowhere in the book. The authors possessed both a general law about the continuity of internal and external policy and a large recent instance of their own state acting abroad, and the law is not permitted to travel.
Then there is the treatment of the doctrine's founding proposition. Chapter One arrives at "the fundamental principle of historical materialism" — that social being determines social consciousness — and needs an illustration. It chooses this one:
Thus, in socialist countries the socialist transformation of small-scale peasant economy farming is implemented on co-operative principles. The life and work of the peasantry in production work collectives (formerly everybody worked on individual farms) bring about radical changes in their views and psychology: they become collectivist, internationalist, and socialist.
The word collectivisation does not occur anywhere in this book. Thirteen occurrences of the stem are all collectivism and collectivist. What is being described in that paragraph is the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, rendered in the present tense, in the passive voice, with no country, no decade, no agent and no cost, as the textbook example of the law that material life shapes consciousness. Historians continue to argue about the death toll of 1932–33 and the range is wide; nobody argues that the peasantry entered the collective farms as an illustration of a philosophical principle. This is the single paragraph on which the volume should be judged, because the failure is not a suppressed fact sitting in a footnote — the suppression is doing the pedagogical work.
Finally, and most revealingly, Chapter Nine. Its second section is called "The Role of Outstanding Individuals". That is Plekhanov's subject and very nearly his title: The Role of the Individual in History (1898) is the classic Russian treatment, it was written against exactly the "hero and the crowd" theory this chapter attacks, and Progress had Plekhanov's Selected Philosophical Works in five volumes on its own list, cited by page in other Soviet textbooks of the period. Plekhanov's name occurs once in this book, inside the title of a Lenin article. The chapter reproduces his argument — that the demand for leadership is generated by conditions, and that "In his or her place there could be another outstanding figure" — without him.
Having reached the question, the chapter then names the outstanding individuals: "Jose Marti and Fidel Castro in Cuba, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Agostinho Neto in Angola, Ernst Thaelmann in Germany, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti in Italy, Maurice Thorez in France, and so on." Eight men, and Lenin. Not one Soviet figure after 1924. In a Soviet textbook, on the role of the individual in history, the entire Soviet leadership of six decades is a blank.
And then the sentence that the whole chapter exists to reach:
Personality cult is foreign to the science of revolution and the practice of existing socialism. When and where these instances do appear, for certain temporary reasons, they harm the revolutionary movement and socialist construction.
Read it slowly. The cult is foreign to the practice — that is, it cannot be generated by socialist society, only visited upon it. It appears "when and where", never who or when. It has "certain temporary reasons" which are not specified. It harms things, and nobody does it. Thirty-two years after the Twentieth Congress, this is the whole of it. Immediately before, the chapter has already disposed of the people concerned in a single clause: "we know quite a few names of those who played an important part and enjoyed authority among the masses while they were revolutionary fighters, and lost their influence the moment they left their ranks." Quite a few names, and not one of them printed. Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin: zero, zero, zero — checked against the scanner's known damage patterns as well as the plain spellings.
The glossary supplies the concept that makes this coherent. "Responsibility, historical" is defined as "individuals', classes', and parties' awareness of the negative consequences entailed in non-use of objectively conditioned possibilities of historical development." Historical responsibility, in this book, is responsibility for opportunities not taken. There is no definition here under which anyone could be responsible for anything they did.
One further measurement, offered without the inference the series has retired. Opportunism and its cognates occur four times, revisionism nine — modest by the standards of this catalogue, and frequency proves nothing on its own. What is worth reporting is the shape. Revisionism "is an attempt to revise Marxism-Leninism on the pretext of developing it. This leads to opportunism: a direct betrayal of the interests of the working class." No revisionist is named. No act is dated. No organisation is identified. The charge is an essence, and it is unfalsifiable by construction — and it is never, in either form, available for use against the Party that commissioned the book.
The apparatus tells the same story from another angle. The book attacks bourgeois futurology at length and names two men. Brzezinski it cites properly. Alvin Toffler it summarises across two paragraphs and never cites at all. And the most recent bourgeois work in the whole volume is Brzezinski's of 1970 — the "contemporary" opposition against which a 1985 primer defines itself is fifteen years old.
The exact counterpart to Chapter Nine exists, and it is worth putting beside it. George Novack published "Importance of the Individual in History-Making" in the International Socialist Review, vol. 26 no. 1 (whole no. 170), Winter 1965, p. 3, under his pen name William F. Warde — the attribution is from the ISR's own printed index of 1964–66 — and later collected it in Understanding History as "From Lenin to Castro". It is a popular essay on the same question, written for the same kind of reader — activists, not academics — and turning on an argument between Isaac Deutscher and Trotsky over whether Lenin was replaceable in 1917. It reaches Plekhanov by name in its third paragraph, calling The Role of the Individual in History a "classical essay" and summarising its argument accurately. It quotes Deutscher's chapter and Sidney Hook's New Leader review of 11 May 1964. It concedes what it must: "There are long stretches of time when the strongest-willed revolutionist cannot in the least avail against the march of events and practically counts for nothing in redirecting them." And it treats the cult of the individual not as something foreign to socialism but as an intellectual problem with a history, discussing Deutscher's charge that Trotsky himself had lapsed toward it and giving the psychological explanation offered, before rejecting it on evidence. Every disputant is named, every claim is sourced, and the reader is left able to disagree. Berbeshkina, Yakovleva and Zerkin's version of the same chapter contains no disputant, no source and no date.
On the substance, the standing answer is Trotsky's, and it is answering these formulations specifically. Against "the socialist state of all the people", The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had already written: "State property becomes the property of 'the whole people' only to the degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith the necessity of the state" (ch. 9, "Social Relations in the Soviet Union"). Against the announcement that the classless structure of society will be established within the framework of developed socialism, ch. 10 offers the shortest possible reply: "Classes are abolished. Of Soviets there remains only the name. But the bureaucracy is still there." And against the deferral of the state's withering away to the world correlation of forces, ch. 3 names a different cause: the Soviet state is prevented from dying away "not by the 'relics' of former ruling classes... It is prevented by immeasurably mightier factors, such as material want, cultural backwardness and the resulting dominance of 'bourgeois law'". One may reject Trotsky's conclusions; what cannot be said is that the question had not been put.
The sharpest contemporaneous exchange sits in the first issue of the International Marxist Review (vol. 1 no. 1, 1982), which printed extracts from an article by Felix Kuznetsov — identified there as First Secretary of the Union of Moscow Writers, writing in Literaturnaya Gazeta — on Poland, alongside Ernest Mandel's reply, "Poland and the bureaucracy". Kuznetsov's piece attributes Solidarność to manipulation by a handful of KOR conspirators working for NATO. Mandel's answer turns the doctrine of this textbook against its own house:
For Marxists it is social existence that determines consciousness, it is not 'manipulated consciousness' which determines existence.
And a paragraph later: "In limiting themselves to talking lightly of simple leadership 'errors' Kremlin ideologists ... want to hide this elementary truth of historical materialism." (The journal prints Kuznetsov's forename inconsistently — Felix in its editorial headnote, Victor in Mandel's text; the writer is Felix Kuznetsov, and the ellipsis above removes the slip rather than reproducing it.) That is the charge, made three years before this book was printed and on precisely its terrain: not that Soviet historical materialism is false in its premises, but that it suspends its own founding premise at the border.
Two honest limits. There is no contemporaneous reply to this book anywhere in the archives held for this series, and no reason there should be — it is a party-school primer, not an event. Intercontinental Press, the Trotskyist weekly best placed to have noticed it, ceased publication on 11 August 1986; the International Marxist Review has a hole from 1983 to 1985 and only one issue before 1986. What the reply corpus supplies is not a review but the argument, made earlier and on the record.
Read it, first, for what it is: the last complete, unembarrassed statement of Soviet historical materialism before the language changed. In 1985 the syllabus still ran on "developed socialism", the state was still "of the whole people", and the Twenty-Sixth Congress was still the horizon. Within eighteen months every one of those phrases would be in trouble. No later document shows the position so plainly, because after 1986 nobody in Moscow could set it out without hedging.
Read it, second, for the passages that are simply good — the account of transboundary pollution, the refusal to confuse necessity with inevitability, the concession that spontaneity survives socialism. These are not window-dressing; they are what a careful teacher wrote when the subject let him.
Read it, third, for the exact location of the fracture, which is easier to find here than in any other volume in this series, because the book is about society and cannot get out of the way. Its authors possessed a general law that external policy follows internal policy, and applied it only to Washington. They possessed the category of bureaucracy, and spent it on the state the revolution destroys. They possessed a concept of historical responsibility, and defined it so that it could only mean an opportunity missed. They possessed the founding proposition that social being determines social consciousness, and illustrated it with the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, told as a story in which the peasants changed their minds. Every one of those is a working Marxist instrument, correctly described on the page, pointed carefully away from home.
Plekhanov, in the book that gave this series its architecture and whose author it does not name, wrote that the task of the dialectical materialist is to carry the torch out of "the narrow study of the 'intellectual.'" Licht, mehr Licht, he added. It is the right demand to bring to this volume, and it is the one it cannot meet.