History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)

Overview

The book was commissioned by Stalin in 1935. Regarding the motives for compiling it, Robert Service quoted a Bolshevik official who said there was a need for a book which "instead of the Bible" would "give a rigorous answer [...] [t]o the many important questions". At the time, the party was concerned with the abundance of publications about the AUCP (B)'s history and sought to have a single, simple and authoritative book on the subject. The book was written by a team of historians and party members, with the principal authors being Vilhelm Knorin, Pyotr Pospelov and Yemelyan Yaroslavsky. Stalin wrote the chapter about dialectical materialism.

In 1937, a draft of the Short Course was submitted to Stalin, who in turn requested several revisions to the text, including more historical background. On 16 April, the Politburo decreed that Knoriņ, Pospelov and Yaroslavsky would be relieved from all their other party obligations for a period of four months in order to complete the Short Course.

Between 8 September and 17 September 1938, Pospelov, Yaroslavsky, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Zhdanov (Knorin was arrested in the Great Purge and executed on 29 July 1938) met daily with Stalin in his office at the Kremlin to make the last edits to the manuscript. The first chapter appeared in Pravda on 9 September 1938 and the rest of the text was published in serial form, the last chapter on 19 September. On that day, the Politburo decided to have a first edition of six million copies, to be sold at a particularly low price—three rubles a copy, equivalent to the price of a liter and half of milk at the time. On 1 October, the book was released.

On 14 November, the Central Committee issued a resolution On Conduct of Party Propaganda in Connection with the Publication of the Short Course, stating it "ends all arbitrariness and confusion in the presentation of Party history" and turning the book into mandatory reading in the curriculum of all university students and attendants of party schools. The Comintern described the text as the "Encyclopedia of Marxism-Leninism".

Generally speaking, the book characterized Lenin and Stalin as the ideologically correct Bolsheviks and that Party history was a struggle between this "correct" line and various "mistaken" lines.

Until Stalin's death in March 1953, the Short Course was reprinted 301 times and had 42,816,000 copies issued in Russian alone. In addition, it was translated to 66 other languages. In Hungary, 530,000 copies were printed between 1948 and 1950. In Czechoslovakia, over 652,000 copies were printed from 1950 to 1954. It was the most widely disseminated work in Stalin's time and no communist publication broke its record until Quotations from Chairman Mao.

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev formally repudiated the Short Course in his "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" speech. A new authoritative history of the party written by a team headed by Boris Ponomarev was published in 1960 under the name The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This publication was subsequently revised and republished in 1964.

Later revisions

In the Short Course, veteran Bolshevik leaders like Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, who conflicted with Stalin and were killed in the late 1930s were depicted as double-dealers who from the very beginning "opposed Lenin and the Bolshevik party".

Polish political philosopher Leszek Kołakowski described the "Short Course" as "perfect manual of false history and doublethink":

"Its lies and suppressions were too obvious to be overlooked by readers who had witnessed the events in question: all but the youngest party members knew who Trotsky was and how collectivization had taken place in Russia, but, obliged as they were to parrot the official version, they became co-authors of the new past and believers in it as party-inspired truth. If anyone challenged this truth on the basis of manifest experience, the indignation of the faithful was perfectly sincere. In this way Stalinism really produced the ‘new Soviet man’: an ideological schizophrenic, a liar who believed what he was saying, a man capable of incessant, voluntary acts of intellectual self-mutilation."

In the 1960 revision of the official party history, the laundry list of inner-party bogeys was replaced by an understated acknowledgement that "many honest Communists and non-Party people" had been subjected to "repressions." Still contending that "Trotskyists, Zinovievites, Right-wingers, and nationalists...deceived the Party in the course of their struggle against it...and were often in league with counter-revolutionary elements," the new history pinned the blame for the brutal events of 1937–38 on "the political adventurer and scoundrel, Beria," as well as the "dispicable role" played by Yezhov," which had caused "many honest people" to be "exterminated." No systemic flaw in the process of investigation, interrogation, or legal dispensation is noted; rather, all bad deeds are personalized to the actions of a couple bad actors.

The version of the Communist Party's official history published in 1964, following the further effort at de-Stalinization started two years earlier at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU went somewhat further, directly criticizing the Stalinist Short Course for having had "serious shortcomings," such as "being pervaded by the spirit of the Stalin personality cult" and failing to "elucidate many questions of Party history faithfully and objectively." Responsibility for the Terror is laid more direcly at Stalin's feet, also placing responsiblity for gross violations of Party rules and Soviet law on the activity of Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Georgy Malenkov. Stalin is directly blamed for installing Yezhov and Beria and starting the avalanche of "repressive measures" which came to swallow up "perfectly innocent people," thereby "causing serious damage to the Communist Party and to socialist construction."

These changes were a pale reflection of an ongoing struggle within the historical profession in the USSR, in which an upstart group of historians identified as the "New Direction" (novoe napravlenie) sought to revise centrally-directed historical orthodoxy, breaking with ideological paradigms epitomized by the 1938 Short Course. This battle between anti-Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, which had begun in 1956 in the aftermath of de-Stalinization and the process of rehabilitation of those wrongfully executed, imprisoned, or exiled during the Terror, turned with the October 1964 removal of Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary of the CPSU and his replacement as top leader of the USSR by a troika headed by Leonid Brezhnev.

Following the emergence and consolidation of power by Brezhnev, a new neo-Stalinist orthodoxy came to dominate Soviet history-writing by the end of the decade of the 1960s. In 1970 a new Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was published, again headed by a team of historians headed by the venerable and adaptable Boris Ponomarev. The problem of Stalin, his inner circle, and secret police chiefs Yezhov and Beria and the repression they wrought was dodged through omission, with one paragraph glorifying the 1936 constitution and 1937 legislative election followed by a paragraph glorifying the 18th Congress of the CPSU in March 1939, with nary a discouraging word about General Secretaries, secret police chiefs, or violent repressions of friends and enemies allowed to interrupt the triumphalist narrative.

This veneration of the past through omission of negative aspects would remain policy until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and his subsequent campaigns for "restructuring" (perestroika), "openness" (glasnost), and "democratization" (demokratizatsiia), which entailed a serious and fundamental reexamination of the myriad of "blank spots" of Soviet history.

Influence in China

The text was translated into Chinese in 1942. It was influential in Mao Zedong's thinking. Assessing the text's description of economic planning, in 1942 Mao stated, "We must go in the same spirit."

Although the Short Course was eventually rejected by the Soviet leadership during the Khrushchev Thaw, its formulations, continued to be of fundamental importance in China, where Mao repeatedly attacked his opponents in the Chinese Communist Party as "capitalist roaders" and agents of bourgeois, counter-revolutionary and Kuomintang conspiracies. Mao felt that the Short Course best combined the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin as well as being a blue print to applying communist ideals in the real world. China was continuing to grow into a Marxist–Leninist state with the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.