Progress Publishers: A Short History

Progress Publishers lived up to its name. It’s hard to look at one’s bookshelf and not find a title brought out by them. But the reason for its existence was greater than what one would refer to as soft power. Vijay Prashad writes in his introduction to The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, ‘It was because, as Lenin noted, cultural absorption was a good in itself, and that it would help expand the imagination and create a richer, better world. More learning about different places could only bring people together, to prevent bigotry and narrowness to structure the modern consciousness.’

Progress Publishers: A Short History

… Progress’s origins could be found in the utopian visions of the immediate post-Revolutionary period. In the realm of literature, one of the main generators of these was Maxim Gorky, who proposed a World Literature publishing house that would translate all foreign literatures into Russian, Russian literature into all the major languages of the world, and finally, all of the above into the languages of the Soviet Union. An economically devastated and politically isolated Civil War era Russia, however, was not a place where such visions could be realized. A World Literature publishing house did appear between 1919 and 1924, focused only on one part of Gorky’s vision: the translation of world classics into Russian. While it offered much-needed employment to Petersburg writers as translators and editors, paper shortages, organizational difficulties, and lack of funding ultimately meant that most of their translations remained unpublished.

With time, however, the resources at the disposal of the Soviet state grew and elements of these early visions began to be realized even if compromised to one degree or another by the growing Stalinist stratification. Founded in 1931, a Moscow-based literary magazine with issues in several languages, Literature of the World Revolution (renamed in the beginning of the Popular Front period to International Literature) may have been the most visible structure of Soviet literary internationalism. Yet more significant, especially as far as non-Soviet readers were concerned, was the establishment that same year in Moscow of the Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), Progress’s predecessor, which translated books into foreign languages. By that time, there were already several other foreign-language newspapers in the city: the Polish Tribuna Radzecka, the French Journal de Moscou, the English Moscow News as well as The Communist International, which was publishing issues in German, English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. Besides, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCE) was already translating and printing the works of Lenin and other political literature in different languages. ITIR drew its translators and editors from both polyglot Soviet citizens with foreign experience and political refugees, often with Comintern connections. Indeed, its staff reflected the composition of Moscow’s foreign community and its shifts: from the influx of Spanish refugees in the late 1930s to their retirement or departures for Mexico, Cuba, or Spain in the 1960s and ’70s, from the return of the Moscow-based East European exiles to their countries in the mid-1940s to the increasing numbers of non-Western subjects in post-Stalin-era Moscow such as the main translator of nineteenthcentury Russian literature in Hindi—Madan Lal Madhu (1925– 2014). A number of (foreign) faculty at the interwar Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV ), where M.N. Roy had taught, and in the post-Second World War-era Institute of Africa and Asia at Moscow State University, Peoples’ Friendship University (founded in 1959), renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961, and the various Institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (of Africa, of Oriental Studies, of Latin America, and so on) also helped with the selection, edition, and translation of texts. Over the course of the 1970s and ’80s, the publishing house increasingly came to rely on contracts with foreign translators located worldwide. Indeed, throughout its existence, it boasted relationships with publishing houses such as the New York-based International Publishers or Lawrence & Wishart in London, which would often reprint, commission, and help with the distribution of the texts.

In the history of publishing, there has probably never been a press so linguistically ambitious. In its first year (1931), it published in 10 West European (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese), seven East European (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian), and five Asian languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Persian, and Turkish). And while the first post-Second World War decade saw the emergence of an Afro-Arab (Arabic, Amhara, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili) and Indian (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu) sections, it was in the post-Stalin era that non-Western languages came to dominate the overall publishing plans. Over the course of the 1960s alone, the number of ‘Eastern’ languages doubled, from 15 to 28. By 1980, the Indian section was producing more titles than the English one, which had led the publishing house since its foundation. (Throughout this period, books in the colonial languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—were also being sent to Africa, Asia, and Latin America by ITIR’s distributor, Mezhkniga.) By the time it came to an end in 1991, Progress was a behemoth publishing yearly close to 2,000 new titles with a print run approaching 30 million copies.

The institutional history of ITIR is a story of constant internal re-organizations and the accompanying re-namings. In 1938, it became Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages, a name later taken by several Soviet-bloc publishing houses modelled after it.^* It lasted until 1963, when it was merged with the Publishing House of Foreign Literature to become Progress Publishers, the name it carried in the last three decades of its existence. Thus, unlike its earlier iterations—ITIR and the Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages, which were solely concerned with publishing texts in foreign languages—Progress also translated foreign texts into Russian and enjoyed a significant Soviet readership. Among its translations deposited in the Russian State Library, the Soviet library of record, one finds Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, Henry Kissinger’s, and many other Cold War writings as well as scholarship and journalism hostile to the USSR such as Leonard Schapiro’s histories of the USSR . Such politically sensitive material was meant only for limited distribution or for research libraries. But the vast majority of Progress’s Russian translations were available to the general Soviet reader, offering the reader access to contemporary Western scholarship through special series such as Critique of Bourgeois Ideology and Revisionism, Western Economic Thought, Social Sciences Abroad. While outwardly critical of the Western theories they were dedicated to, these series offered generous summaries of them, thus providing unique access to the adroit Soviet reader, who would easily skip the criticism. In addition to serving as a Soviet window to Western scholarship, Progress and its predecessors had concentrated so many translators in one space that it also served as an important site where Soviet theories of translation could be elaborated. In the course of trying to systematize translation practices within ITIR, World Literature Publishing House, and International Literature, the Soviet theory of ‘adequate translation’—crudely speaking, a compromise between the twin poles of ‘free’ and ‘literal’ translation—was developed.

It was publishing in foreign languages, however, that accounted for the vast majority of Progress’s output. Many around the world fondly remember Progress’s cheap, high quality editions of otherwise unavailable Marxist literature. In addition to the classics of Marxism and Leninism, the other three areas Progress published in were politics, textbooks & illustrated materials, and fiction. Fiction emerged as a distinct field of the publishing house only gradually, as the classics of Marxism-Leninism and contemporary political studies had initially been the main focus of ITIR’s work. Over the course of the 1930s, however, some of the publishing house’s more distinguished translators such as Alice Oran, George Rui, Maximilian Schick, Hilda Angarova, Jose Vento, Angel Errais, Margaret Amrome, Ivy Litvinova (Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov’s wife) began to translate the classics of Russian and early Soviet literature into foreign languages. Slowly, over the post-war era, the literature section became the largest of Progress’s four thematic sections, reaching in 1981 a volume of 404 titles. The following year, 1982, it evolved into an independent publishing house, Raduga (Rainbow). By that point, the editorial choices for texts to be translated could easily veer away from the safe classics to include more debatable contemporary Soviet literature such as Valentin Rasputin and Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novels. There has never been another publishing house worldwide that could compete with its ability to popularize Russian and Soviet literature abroad, or more generally, any publishing attempt of such scale to create a direct translation link between two non-Western literatures, bypassing the monopolies of London, Paris and New York. And yet, together with all other Soviet projects for world literature, this one has been largely forgotten, except maybe for the occasional volume in public libraries and private collections.

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^{* After the Second World War, Foreign Language Publishing Houses began to appear in Warsaw, Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest and, on a somewhat bigger scale, East Berlin, Hanoi, and Beijing. Most of them were focused on presenting their own country, political situation, culture and literature to foreigners. The Chinese version, which still exists, was particularly active during the Sino-Soviet split and Cultural Revolution. From 1966, it began printing in multiple languages one of the world’s greatest bestsellers, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (aka the Little Red Book).↩}

Rossen Djagalov is an assistant professor of Russian at New York University, a research fellow of the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, HSE, Moscow, and a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast.