The Anatomy of Communism by Andrew M. ScottReview by: R. N. Carew HuntThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 31, No. 76 (Dec., 1952), pp. 312-313Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204442 .

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312 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

There are some errors. On p. 18 'Leopold' for Lwow is probably a mis?

print; but Mstislav did not defeat the Polovtsy (Polovecians) in ii40 (p. 16), because he was dead, and Igor' in 1185 was himself defeated by them. The Polovtsy were overwhelmed in 1116 by Vladimir Monomakh and his son Yaropolk.

A welcome addition to this learned, lucid and well-documented work is a short bibliography and three excellent plans and descriptions of Cracow, Breslau and Louvain. The author mentions that the inspiration to write this little book came from Professor W. Konopczynski of Cracow and from Professor Leon van der Essen of Louvain. One might add to these names that of his own father, whose work as an historian is remembered with

respect, especially by those of us who knew him.

A. Bruce Boswell.

The Anatomy of Communism. By Andrew M. Scott. Philosophical Library, New York, 1951. 197 pages.

This book is a useful analysis of the basic concepts of Marxism-Leninism, the more so as it brings together the more important passages from the canonical writings in which these concepts are set out. Dr Scott takes as his starting point the position which Marx had already reached by the time he wrote the German Ideology, that there is no such thing as human nature in the abstract and that man is simply the sum of his social

relations, which depend on the stage of development of the productive forces. As, however, these forces have been controlled throughout recorded

history by a minority, the social relations which derive from them have

always taken the form of exploitation, dividing society into two classes whose interests are irreconcilable. The ensuing class struggle thus be? comes the motive force behind the dialectic of history. The form which that struggle has assumed under capitalism is that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The dialectic assures the victory to the proletariat. It is destined to wrest from the bourgeoisie that control over the productive forces which, according to the economic interpretation of history, will give it control over everything else. The revolution which brings this about will set up the dictatorship of the proletariat under which the means of produc? tion will be socially owned, though how the proletariat is to administer them is nowhere explained.

Dr Scott has no difficulty in showing that the Marxist concept of the class bears little relation to reality. If, however, the proletariat was to

carry out its historic mission, it was essential to represent it as an entity with its own class will, or consciousness; and thus in the Marxist scheme its revolution is the expression of a force which is spontaneous, instinctive and

irrepressible. But Lenin, who was less concerned with the theoretical basis of social evolution than with organising a revolution, early saw that the doctrine of spontaneous development made no sense, as the workers, if left to themselves, were not revolutionary at all. Hence he elaborated his doctrine of the Party and raised it to the level of a dogma. The Party alone

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REVIEWS 313

understands the historic process and can discern where the true interests

of the proletariat lie. This doctrine had already been adumbrated in the

Communist Manifesto, but Marx had not found it necessary to develop it. There are those who hold Marx to have been a democrat betrayed by

Lenin; while a nearer-to-the-left school holds Lenin to have been a democrat also and makes Stalin the betrayer. Yet democracy is not the rule of a single section of society and the elimination of every other section that its leaders decide is counter-revolutionary. Nor, again, was the

Commune, identified by Marx after the event with the dictatorship of the

proletariat, a democratic government, seeing that the Paris workers had no mandate to rule the country which they would speedily have reduced to ruin had they continued. Lenin at least saw that his version of the

dictatorship was incompatible with those representative institutions which are essential to democracy, though he found it convenient to attach the term 'democratic' to it, as it is attached today to the sovietised regimes of the satellite countries. The removal of'capitalist exploitation' has nothing to do with democracy. There was no capitalism in ancient Egypt; but there was a powerful bureaucracy and a slave population just as there is in Russia today. Dr Scott somewhat overemphasises the divergencies be? tween Marxist-Leninist theory and Stalinist practice. In fact the present Soviet economy of state capitalism controlled by an elite is the logical out? come of the social and economic principles of Marx and Lenin, whose zeal for revolution made them indifferent to the inevitable consequences of

applying them.

R. N. Carew Hunt.

Russko-chuvashskiy slovar'. (Russian-Chuvash Dictionary.) By N. K. Dmitri?

yev (ed.). Gosudarstvennoye Izdatel'stvo Inostrannykhi Natsional'-

nykh Slovarey, Moscow, 1951. 896 pages. Grammatical supple? ment.

Chuvash-Russian dictionaries, like N. I. Ashmarin's 17-volume Thesaurus

linguae tschuwaschorum, with its 40,000 words, and V. G. Yegorov's more modest compilation (20,000), have both been exceeded in scope by this new dictionary of large format, which contains 45,000 Russian words. The explicit purpose of the book is to familiarise Chuvashes with the modern Russian vocabulary, especially its political and social terms, in order to enable them to acquire a fuller understanding of the language and to improve the quality of their translations from it. As the line of least resistance has been followed by Chuvash in the process of borrowing from

Russian, many of the borrowed words (e.g. roCTHHHij;a, HMnyjibC, njiom;- a#Ka, XHHa) are merely orthographic replicas of their originals, and even where they are not quite like these, the difference is often very slight (e.g. aKini for aKinm). Subtracting such borrowed words, of which there are

many in this book, from the total of 45,000, we are left with a much smaller number of native Chuvash equivalents of the Russian titles. This leaves Ashmarin's collection still in undisputed authority as the fullest

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