Mistranslations of Marx in the USSR?

[Chomskyan]

I´ve heard a claim that there were mistranslations done of Marx and other writings of Marx that were suppressed in the USSR.

Has anybody heard of this before? I couldn´t find anything on Google...

[Asero]

I doubt there'd be as much mistranslation as misinterpretation.

[Sewer Socialist]

Are you thinking of Lars Lih? He wrote about translations of Lenin, though.

[Chomskyan]

It was just an offhand claim that I heard. Just thought I´d ask the forum.

[Blake's Baby]

There is a rumour that some of Marx's work was not made readily available to the general public - especially works dealing with the Asiatic mode of production, if I remember correctly.

[Faust Arp]

Somewhat off-topic, but there's a local Stalinist website which hosts a heavily censored version of Lenin's State and Revolution. :v

[Chomskyan]

So it is just a rumor? Specifically, the claim was that texts of Marx studied in Soviet school curriculum were edited and changed in various ways.

The claimant was implying it was done to defend Stalinist or post-Stalinist Soviet policies.

[Blake's Baby]

I don't know, I didn't go to school in the Eastern Bloc.

From what I remember, during the Cold War, it was claimed by Anarchists and/or non-ML communists that the USSR restricted access (through both limited printing and heavy editing) to various of Marx's texts that could be used to provide criticisms of the Stalinist state. Which texts exactly I don't know.

[sanpal]

It is impossible. It was impossible because of big contradictions between theoretical views in communist parties of the different countries. Translation errors or concealing of quotes would become arguments in the proof of a wrongfulness. I think that the theory of Marxism has been presented to the USSR in full. But all theoretical disagreements in communistic thought in various countries began with false interpretation. You can be convinced of it on the example of prosperity of a huge sektarianism in the modern international communistic movement based on the only Marxist doctrine.

[sanpal]

The Stalinism is just a striking example of the wrong interpretation of the Marxist doctrine and this wrong interpretation is proved in the most Marxist theory, in "Anti-Duhring" written by Engels with the Marx (economic part).

[Blake's Baby]

I don't know if, for example, Albanian or Chinese Communists would know if certain texts were only available in edited versions for the general public or if some were not available at all. How could the Albanian or Chinese Communists find out what was being taught in schools or available in libraries?

[Noa Rodman]

There was a similar question on the libcom forum some years ago. I don't know what the source of this claims is, if any.

When Riazanov was dismissed as head of the Marx-Engels Institute and replaced by Adoratskij, this effected the quality of the research (as Kautsky noted apropos the topic of the history of Marx's Gotha critique: Zur Geschichte des Marxschen Programmbriefes von 1875" in Die Gesellschaft, 1932 online btw (http://library.fes.de/gesellschaft/ges-chro.html)). Still, the research then is to some extent still more advanced than what we have available today in teh West. For example Marx's Chronological Notes (Chronologische Auszuge) on world history, afaik, have been published only in Russian (Хронологические выписки): Volumes 5-8 (during 1938-1946) of the Marx and Engels Archives, online at http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/M/MARKS_Karl,_ENGEL'S_Fridrih/_Marks_K.,_Engel's_F..html#005

There is an English translation of a manuscript with a related kind of notes (history of India):
https://archive.org/details/notesonindianhis00marxuoft

[Ismail]

During the Cold War the most extensive writings of Marx and Engels were compiled in, as you might guess, the German Democratic Republic. These were known as the Marx-Engels Werke. This multi-volume collection was the basis for Russian translations (Sobranie sochinenii), which in turn were the basis for the Collected Works put out by the USSR in English and other languages.

The aforementioned Werke had material that the Russian (and derivative) translations didn't, and there were still many, many unpublished writings by Marx and Engels. So for example a 1989 Soviet biography of Marx (https://archive.org/details/KarlMarxABiography) I scanned a while ago cites not just the Soviet-published Collected Works in English, but also the GDR-published Werke as well as materials from the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which housed a lot of their unpublished writings.

A guy I know had an uncle was a member of the Communist Party of Australia and who visited the GDR in the 70s. He said that when he talked to an East German academic about Marx's and Engels' writings, the academic started a rant on how an unpublished manuscript by Marx had been "stolen" by a Polish academic who refused to give it back because he was writing a thesis that was taking years, and the GDR's Academy of Sciences sent a team to its Polish counterpart to make a deal: force the academic to hand the manuscript over and we'll give you some letters by Rosa Luxemburg in their Polish originals. Alas, the Polish Academy of Sciences was not interested.

But yeah I haven't heard anything about intentional mistranslations of the writings of Marx and Engels, either under Stalin or after him. As far as "censorship" of their writings, there was a claim in the early 50s that Stalin was suppressing any such writings of theirs condemning Tsarism but that wasn't true (https://www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1953/xx/me-russia.html).

As far as Lenin's Sobranie sochinenii went, the Russian editions are larger than the English-language Collected Works derived from them. There was also a large multi-volume collection of writings by Lenin known as Miscellany that were never translated into English. Under Yuri Andropov there was a plan to release ten additional volumes of Lenin's collected works in Russian and in other languages, but the project got delayed and by the time 1989-1990 rolled around Gorbachev's advisers told him to delay the project, since it contained diplomatically "untimely" materials (e.g. Lenin talking about financing Indian revolutionaries and stuff like that.)

The only case I know of the Soviets altering Lenin's works were removing some text in letters between him and Inessa Armand that may have suggested they were romantically linked. Otherwise the only form of "censorship" was withholding texts from publication, e.g. Lenin's "Last Testament" wasn't published until after 1956 and a bunch of letters between Lenin and Trotsky on military matters during the Civil War also were never published.

Stalin's collected works were basically ready for publication in the 1930s but Stalin advised against publishing them. It wasn't until 1946 that the first volume came out in Russian. Only 13 volumes were released, covering Stalin's writings and speeches up to 1934, as the project was discontinued in 1956.

Chinese editions of the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were explicitly based off of the Russian translations. This was the same with Albanian translations and every other translation.


Somewhat off-topic, but there's a local Stalinist website which hosts a heavily censored version of Lenin's State and Revolution. :vIt was published in full throughout the whole history of the USSR, so I dunno who that "Stalinist" is but he's doing a great disservice to Stalinism if I do say so myself.


There is a rumour that some of Marx's work was not made readily available to the general public - especially works dealing with the Asiatic mode of production, if I remember correctly.Under Stalin the writings of Marx and Engels on the "Asiatic mode of production" weren't censored, but were supposedly "neglected" since they were treated more like notes and miscellany as both men had later abandoned the idea of a separate "Asiatic" mode. Accordingly, the "Asiatic mode of production" wasn't mentioned in Soviet theoretical works from the early 30s to the early 50s.

After Stalin's death the Soviet revisionists began reviving the subject for their own anti-Marxist ends, and much more attention was drawn to it.