Comrade Vijay Singh our founder editor, breathed his last after a two-month long battle with cancer. Even in his very final days he was concerned with continuation of this journal and the printing of the current issue, which he had already assiduously prepared for publication. Despite his failing health, he was at his work every day, examining documents, translations, and articles for publication, contacting contributors to the journal and responding to comrades who came to him with queries. His love and care extended far beyond his own family to include a very wide circle of friends and comrades, generous to their faults but always prodding all of us to work relentlessly for our chosen cause.

Vijay Singh taught history at the University of Delhi. – He was a very considerate teacher who spoke in low tone but went out of his way to help his students. At the university he was perennially engaged in making the history curriculum meaningful and politically relevant, in fighting for the legitimate rights of the teachers and university staffand at the same time insisting on professional accountability. He was a fearless defender of democratic rights of all oppressed people, dalits, adivasis, women, religious minorities, revolutionary activists, Kashmiri activists, besides workers and peasants. Above all he was engaged in relentless but deeply respectful dialogues and debates with revolutionary comrades across the globe. His internationalism was reflected in his endearing relationship with comrades from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal besides other countries. His singular pursuit was to uphold the tenets of Marxism Leninism and the work of the CPSU (b) under Joseph Stalin, and fight against all forms of revisionism which sought to compromise these tenets. For this purpose, he delved deep into libraries and archives across continents, especially the Russian archives, locating relevant documents and publishing them with his scholarly annotations and introductions. He brought high professional standards of a serious historian to this work, ensuring the reliability of such publication. Vijay Singh had developed a deep and critical appreciation of different art forms; literature, paintings, films, architecture, besides classical, jazz, blues and revolutionary music of the toiling peoples. A communist at heart with a strong moral fibre, he demonstrated the intrinsic humanism of Communism by his gentle and softspoken demeanour and utter lack of egoism or self-centeredness.

Vijay Singh was born in pre-partition Rawalpindi on 27 October, 1946, and the family migrated to Delhi during the partition of the country. His father joined the Indian High Commission in London and Vijay moved to England with his parents in 1950. There he went to Haberdasher’s School a celebrated private school and then to Christ’s College in Cambridge. He had joined the youth wing of the Labour Party even as a school student and was radicalised during the anti-Vietnam war struggles of the late 60s. That’s when he turned to Marxism Leninism and came under the influence of organisations like the Indian Marxist Leninist Association (IMLA) and the Marxist Leninist Organisation of Britain (MLOB) and had close interactions with activists like Mike Baker and Bill Bland besides artists like Mauriene Scott. In the early 1970s he met and married Tripta Wahi, then a Ph D student in School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). They chose to return to India to carry on their political work. Both of them joined as history lecturers in Punjab and then shifted to Delhi where they groomed hundreds of students across decades. They have two daughters.

The MLOB was a product of the Great Debate and was critical of CPSU’s policies since 1956, and concluded that capitalism had been restored in the USSR. They were at the same time also critical of the Chinese Communist Party and Mao whom they considered to be a bourgeois nationalist. They also had a streak of syndicalism and left extremism, as a result of which they rejected the United Front Theses of the VII Congress of the Comintern and the policies advocated by G Dimitrov. Thus though Vijay Singh was appreciative of some aspects of their criticism of the CPSU and CCP, he distanced himself from their left extremist positions.

Vijay Singh began his political work in India in the early 1970s. When the Emergency was declared democratic rights were suppressed and the state took on extra-ordinary powers. Those were difficult times for political activists. It was during this phase that he along with another comrade set up the Stalinist Nucleus of India (SNI) and began to engage in discussions with various strands of the Indian left. It was natural to engage more closely with the various groups that had emerged to the left of the CPI-M, largely clubbed as ‘ML’ or adherents of ‘Mao Tse Tung Thought’. They were critical of the CPSU, defended socialist construction under Stalin and opted for a revolutionary path instead of the ‘parliamentary’ path which the two mainstream CPs were pursuing. Vijay Singh’s principal critique of these groups was that they had abandoned work with the urban proletariat and focussed their attention on building ‘rural bases’ which was theoretically justified in terms of identifying feudalism as the ‘principal contradiction’. He was also of the opinion that in entirely abandoning participation in parliamentary process, these groups were committing a left extremist error. Some of these groups also engaged in ‘revolutionary terror’ which the Marxist-Leninist movement had condemned as being counter-productive and which only enabled the consolidation of the reactionary state.

It was also the time when the difference between CCP and the Party of Labour of Albania came to the surface as the latter formally criticised the CCP for it adherence to the Three Worlds Theory and opening its doors to the USA. PLA’s Enver Hoxha emerged as the defender of Marxism Leninism and the work of JV Stalin.

Vijay Singh was instrumental in the setting up the India Albania Friendship Association, in October 1978 with the objective of publicising the views of the PLA and achievements of socialist construction in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. The association published a monthly journal, Socialist Albania during 1978-79. The journal was instrumental in bringing together political groups which were getting disillusioned with both the mainstream left and ML politics. It was in the course of these discussions that Comrade Lashkar Singh of Punjab and Comrade Moni Guha, a veteran Communist revolutionary and Vijay Singh established a fruitful dialogue on the history of revisionism and the anti-revisionist struggles waged by several far sighted individuals in the Indian Communist Movement. The result was the publication of a new series of the Proletarian Path under joint editorship of Moni Guha, Lashkar Singh and Vijay Singh in 1981. The last issue of the journal under this editorial board was published in 1982, devoted entirely to the emergence of Solidarity in Poland. Vijay Singh in a rigorously researched article traced the dismantling of socialist economic framework of Poland and restoration of capitalism resulting in the severe economic crises which triggered the movement in 1981-82.

During the 1980s Vijay Singh was deeply involved in the teacher’s movement in Delhi University, participating in the elections to the Delhi University Teacher’s Association (DUTA), and playing an important role in the strike actions called by the DUTA, which resulted in significant gains for the teachers. He was also involved in the efforts undertaken by the history department of the university to revamp the undergraduate and post graduate syllabi to bring them in line with contemporary concerns and closer to Marxist analysis of social history. Besides teaching in a college he also taught courses on European history and Russian / Soviet history in the University. Innumerable students fondly remember his intense teaching and also his concern for the welfare of the students. He often lectured to the students in Hindi, so that they could understand better even though the university did not provide for Hindi medium instruction. He actively sought to ensure that good quality academic materials were available to students in Hindi and assisted the ‘Hindi Implementation’ board of the university in this.

The 1980s in India saw the assertion of ethnic identities; caste, language and religious identities began to play an important part in mass politics. Oppressed castes like the dalits, and castes which had improved their economic status during the last few decades, sought a share in political power. As a counter, right wing Hindu identities and Muslim identities were whipped up. The Left was caught in a fix with rather weak theoretical frameworks to address the new challenges. At this time Vijay Singh stood firmly on the side of the oppressed castes and in opposition to the emergent religious fanaticism.

It was also during this decade that Vijay Singh enrolled himself for a formal Ph.D under Prof Parthasarathy Gupta so as to be able to access archival materials on Soviet history. He began visiting libraries and archives in Western Europe and subsequently in Russia when the archives of CPSU were opened for scholars in 1991-2. Vijay Singh used this opportunity to locate crucial documents relating to policy debates and decisions during the post war period, documents relating to debates about the strategies of the people’s democracies and communist and worker’s parties in various countries, etc. Vijay Singh visited the archives year after year collecting valuable materials. These he studied himself, having learnt Russian in the meanwhile. He also selected the most important among them to be translated and made available to the movement at large. It was in this context that Vijay Singh felt the need for a theoretical journal which delved into the complex manifestations of revisionism, made the long forgotten old debates available to younger comrades and used them to understand contemporary problems facing the movement. The journal was to be a bridge between the past of the world communist movement and the present, a bridge that would be built by the present generation to get illuminations from the past. Thus began the unique dialogue that Revolutionary Democracy has been since its inception in 1995. He subsequently teamed up with a number of comrades to create the Revolutionary Democracy website which became an online repository of crucial documents relating to world communist movement, easily accessible to all.

Vijay Singh had established close contacts with like minded comrades and organisations in several countries and was an active member of several international organisations like the ICMLOP. In all his conversations he was keen to put across what he considered to be Marxist Leninist positions which were advocated by Stalin, the CPSU under his leadership, the Comintern, and the Cominform. We summarise below some of his key positions.

Law of Value and Socialism

One of the earliest articles published in RD relates to an abiding concern of Vijay Singh, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. He built upon a rich body of literature on the subject which began with the ‘Great Debate’, but was developed by the Irish Communist Organisation, MLOB, Red Star, etc besides Marxist scholars like Martin Nicolaus, in the 1960s and 1970s. Several Marxists in India too had worked on this and these were eventually brought to wider notice later on. Vijay Singh built upon these but delved much deeper into the roots of the capitalist restoration and also the process by which it was achieved. For this he accessed both the Russian libraries and subsequently the freshly opened archives of the CPSU and GOSPLAN. As a historian of revisionism, he traced the continuity of revisionist thinking from Bogdonov, Bukharin, Trotsky onto the leading Soviet economists in the time of Stalin and subsequently.

Thus, he was able to trace the strong ideological roots of Soviet revisionism which was to play an important role in the capitalist restoration not only in the USSR but in the entire bloc of peoples’ democracies.

Vijay Singh’s essential argument on this can be summed up as follows:

i. The foundations of socialism had been laid in the USSR by the end of 1930s in so far as all industrial production was carried out in the state sector controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat and agricultural production was partly under the state and partly under collective farms, a kind of group property. Even so, the collective farms did not own the means of production, namely land which had been nationalised and machines and tractors etc which were owned by the state. Both the state sector and the collective farm sectors were under centralised planning through which resources were allocated. Resource allocation was not based on the law of value as in the capitalist system but by the overall needs determined by the proletarian state. A clear indicator of this was the high allocation of resources to the sector of economy producing producers’ goods (ie Department I) compared to sector producing consumer goods (Department II). This was essential for sustained growth of the socialist economy.

ii. This only constituted the first stage of building of socialism and communism in the USSR. There were widespread debates and discussions on the task before the proletarian state to take forward the process. One line of argument was that since the foundations of socialism were so firmly laid, now it was just a matter of rationalising and increasing production. Such rationalisation of production should be done using the law of value which established the relative price of different commodities being produced in the economy. Law of value did and should play a decisive role in the allocation of productive resources (means of production) among different sectors / enterprises. The antecedents of this view went back to pre-revolutionary theorists like Bogdonov and Bukharin.

iii. In opposition to the above-mentioned line of argument, Stalin had argued that the transition to communism required a profound restructuring of Soviet Society and not mere ‘rationalisation of production’. Since at the foundation of the Soviet economy was the duality of property – the state sector on the one hand and the multitudes of group controlled collective farms, transition to higher form of socialism required ‘raising’ of the collective farms to become state farms. This multiplicity of property was the basis of commodity production and the operation of the law of value even if in a muted form. What was required was not opening the scope of law of value to allocate means of production, but to further restrict the scope of the law by homogenising forms of property and social relations of production in the country.

iv. Stalin had further argued that Department I required to be allocated higher resources so as to sustain future growth of the economy which will be an essential condition for being able to undertake the tasks outlined earlier.

v. Politics being the concentrated expression of economics, the process could be steered only by further consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat without diluting it. The proletariat (both urban and rural) had to lead this final transformation of Soviet peasantry into Soviet proletariat.

vi. The debates over Soviet planning between 1941 and all the way up to the publication of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, and the changes in the leadership of the leading economic bodies like the GOSPLAN, show the issues at stake. In hind sight it appears that the ‘rationalisation of production through law of value’ school of thought had widespread support among both economists and the political leadership. It was Stalin’s authority and the support of some of his steadfast comrades that held them at bay.

vii. Subsequent to Stalin’s death (which may or may not have been related to this debate) we see almost immediately the rolling back of the plans and unfolding of the policies to ‘free’ the laws of value in the USSR. Vijay Singh documented this process minutely from the very days following the death of Stalin, the 20th Congress of CPSU and further on. To Vijay Singh the most significant shift came with the selling away of the Machine Tractor Stations to the Collective Farms in 1958 which essentially meant that now in the USSR, the means of production had become commodities and hence allocation of productive resources was governed by the law of value, an essential attribute of capitalism.

Some of his seminal articles on this subject are as follows:

1. ‘Stalin and the Question of 'Market Socialism' in the Soviet Union After the Second World War’, RD April 1995

2. Introduction to ‘Two Letters of Friedrich Engels’, RD, September 1995

3. ‘The CPSU(B), Gosplan and the Question of the Transition to Communist Society in the Soviet Union 1939-1953’, RD April 1997

4. Stalin and the Making of the Political Economy of Socialism, RD September 1998

5. Some Reflections on ‘Khrushchev Lied’ by Grover Furr, RD September 2022

6. Preface to ‘On the New Letter of Yaroshenko’ RD, April 2023

7. Preparation of the 1947 Draft of the Third Programme of the CPSU (b), RD October 2023

8. Introduction to K. Ostrovityanov’s ‘Commodity Production and the Law of Value under Socialism’ April 2025

Peoples’ Democracy

A related issue which was of great concern to Vijay Singh was that of People’s Democracy. Marxist literature in general takes them to be ‘socialist’ or just another capitalist country aligned with ‘Soviet imperialism’. This category had emerged towards the end of the anti-fascist war and was widely seen as a product of broad nationalist united fronts that fought the axis powers whose theoretical underpinnings go back to the united front theses of the VII Congress of the Comintern. It is fairly well known to those familiar with the Great Debate that Yugoslavia under the leadership of Marshall Tito chose to follow a path which was contradictory to the one recommended by the Cominform and CPSU under Stalin. Major events pertaining to the East European Peoples’ Democracies included the Hungarian revolt of 1956, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and subsequently the emergence of Solidarity movement in Poland and the final dismantling of the Berlin wall. The Party of Labour of Albania led by Enver Hoxha initially aligned with the CCP under Mao and subsequently became critical of them when China decided to open doors to US imperialism. A group of countries of the South East Asia like Vietnam, Kampuchea, North Korea besides China and Cuba are also placed in the category of People’s Democracies, most of them claiming to be socialist today. Vijay Singh went beyond names and studied the idea of Peoples’ Democracy as a path to socialism and the actual practice of the countries taking this name. As he examined the Soviet archival materials especially the documents of Cominform and stenographic records of conversations and correspondence with fraternal communist parties and the Soviet leadership under Stalin, Vijay Singh realised that the CPSU held People’s Democracy as an important path for social revolution not only in semi-capitalist or colonised countries, but also for advanced imperialist countries like Japan, the USA and Britain. Study of political consultations with the CPSU leadership and the programmatic documents of most of the countries dating around 1951 clearly showed that Stalin and CPSU favoured Peoples’ Democracy as a preferred path for transformation of these countries. Broad based alliances which would establish genuine democracies in which the interest of the broad masses would be the driving force which will dismantle the power of survivals of feudalism like monarchies, large landholdings, bonded labour, national and ethnic discrimination, and dismantling the hold of ‘monopolies’. This was to be the first stage in the transition to socialism. Given the very wide diversity of the countries to which this form of revolution was recommended, there has been much theoretical confusion. Vijay Singh sought to examine the key documents to unravel the different models of People’s Democracies and also the stages by which they were to transit to socialism and the actual paths taken by them.

One of the earliest articles he wrote on this issue (a case study of Poland) was published in the Proletarian Path issue devoted to Solidarity movement in Poland in 1982. He returned to this theme in 1999 which was also the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution. He studied the discussion in the Soviet academia about the historical and political nature of People’s democracies, the different stages of their development, different models of peoples’ democracies etc while also considering the applicability of the Chinese model to other Asian countries like India. What was underlined is that Peoples’ Democracies arose under the specific condition of the existence of the USSR as a bastion of socialism and proletarian dictatorship which enabled countries with relatively weakly developed proletarian movements to complete the tasks of democratic and nationalist revolution and move forward towards building socialism. In fact, it even considered the case of a country like Mongolia which was supposed to lack a proletarian class altogether.

Vijay Singh noted that around 1950-51 the CPSU and Stalin held extensive discussions with communist parties from different countries and helped them to formulate revised party programmes taking into consideration the experience of anti-Fascist struggles and the new realities of the post war world. This of course included the overwhelming presence of the USSR, the fact that entire Eastern Europe and China had become Peoples’ Democracies and were embarking upon the road to building democratic and socialist societies. Thus, most Communist Parties had come up with new programmes around 1951-2. The conference of Soviet Academia referred to above was also a part of this very process.

It appears from these documents that Stalin and CPSU had come round to the view that under the new conditions of the post war world, communists and workers should seek to identify the unfinished democratic tasks in their countries which may include focussing struggles against monopoly capitalists of those countries which were seen as the main champions of imperialist policies. This would mean forming broad alliances with not only other working people like peasants and artisans but also small capitalists like traders and petty businessmen who were said to be oppressed by the monopoly capitalists. While the leadership was to be firmly in the hands of the working class, it was not a ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat but where power was shared between the proletariat and other classes. Likewise, it did not necessarily mean a Soviet form of democracy but could include parliamentary forms of democracy (parliament elected through universal suffrage). Such a state would be constituted through a revolutionary process If the reactionary classes (landlords, monopolists, capitalists) resorted to violence or sabotage, the state would put them down with full force. However, these were seen as transitional in the sense that once the democratic tasks were completed, there was to be a seamless move to the socialist stage, implying expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the rural kulaks and moving on towards collectivisation in agriculture. What is of significance is that these tasks were to be accomplished by the same state: “the people’s democratic regime is performing the functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for building the foundation of Socialism”. Vijay Singh interpreted this to mean that even in the state the parties representing bourgeoisie (small, middle, nationalist etc) were to be exposed and removed from positions of power.

In 2007 Vijay Singh wrote a comprehensive article on the programme of Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 1951, showing its difference from the previous 1935 programme and also the changes introduced after 1956. He pointed out the changes made subsequent to the XX Congress of CPSU, which gave a radically new interpretation of Peoples’ Democracy paving the way for ‘peaceful parliamentarian path’. Some years later he returned to the theme and wrote a longish article based on his research into certain basic formulations relating to peoples’ democracies in Eastern Europe and China, Korea etc. (‘Some Questions of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the People’s Democracies’ RD April 2022) and finally one of his last articles which was a reply to a defender of North Korea and Kim Il Sung, (Some Problems of the People’s Democratic Revolution in the DPRK RD, October 2025).

Vijay Singh argued that the Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe had embarked on the socialist stage after 1948, while Korea and China were in the process of completing the tasks of democratic revolution (abolition of landlordism, land redistribution, expropriation of the pro-imperialist capitalists and properties held by Japanese colonial governments, etc). As such China and Korea were considered to be forms of ‘democratic dictatorship of Proletariat and Peasantry’ with power shared with patriotic forces. He further pointed out after 1953-56 most of the Peoples’ Democracies with the notable exception of Albania retracted from moving on to the second stage, that is of Socialist transformation, decollectivizing agriculture, or admitting bourgeois elements into the cooperatives or collective farms and not expelling the bourgeois elements in the state. In effect apart from Albania none of the Peoples’ Democracies made the transition from the democratic to the socialist phase. All of them without any justification claimed to be socialist after 1958. Thus, to Vijay Singh this was part of the process of global assault of revisionism and dismantling of socialism. He therefore considered the defence of the Party of Labour of Albania led by Enver Hoxha as an important task of communists leading to the steps to form the India Albania Friendship Association mentioned earlier in this tribute.

In this context it is worth going over Vijay Singh’s understanding of the contributions of Mao to the communist movement. He was of the opinion that till 1953 Mao broadly followed Marxist Leninist principles and subsequently adopted either a left extremist line or a right revisionist line. In fact, he was able to point out how the early publications of Mao’s works dating earlier than 1953-4 carried formulations which were either dropped or revised in subsequent editions. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, Vijay considered Mao to be a revolutionary.

A revolutionary programme for India

Though Vijay Singh had planned to write a comprehensive account of the evolution of the programme of CPI of 1951-2, he had only managed to locate very important archival materials relating to the discussions between the CPSU leadership including Stalin and the different tendencies within the leadership of the CPI. He wrote important notes introducing these documents, most of which were made available in English for the first time. After a profound analysis of these various trends, he had come to the conclusion that the 1951 Programme was the most appropriate and that it continued to be relevant to Indian communist movement to date.

When Vijay Singh began his political work in India, in the early 1970s, it coincided with an upswing in the working class movement as organised strike action had begun to peak just prior to the declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi government. This was accompanied by a kind of downturn in the agrarian revolution program initiated by the so called Naxalbari movement. He felt the need to enter into a dialogue with Naxalbari tendencies as they seem to be neglecting several key areas of revolutionary work and mistakenly focussing on creating rural and subsequently forest bases. He was convinced that a revolutionary movement had to be led by organised working class under the leadership of a Communist Party, and creating peasant or tribal supported bases was not enough especially in the context of a consolidated unitary Indian state supported by imperialism. He felt that communist organisations needed to combine their work with peasantry with organising and leading the urban workers. He also saw the need to include legal and parliamentary work as part of revolutionary strategy as abandoning this wok left the field to the reformists, revisionists and those who advocated the ‘parliamentary road’. Vijay Singh was also opposed the practice of individual terrorism practiced in the name of liquidating ‘class enemies’ which he though only strengthened the state apparatus in the long run. Discussions on this, as earlier spelt out led to the joint editorial board of Proletarian Path. The collaboration, however, slackened as Moni Guha and his comrades began to argue that the stage of revolution in India was now socialist and not democratic and that communists had to work for dictatorship of the proletariat. Vijay Singh sharply disagreed with this formulation, and polemic ensued between Proletarian Path and Revolutionary Democracy. He was of the opinion that India continued to be semi colonial with survivals of landlordism, continuation of tribal and caste based oppression and suppression of national and ethnic minorities. The material conditions for socialism ie. a strong industrial base with emphasis on the production of producer’s goods (‘Department I’), was not there in India. As such the working class had to enter into alliance with the oppressed peasantry, lower castes, tribes and minority nationalities to complete the democratic tasks and then move forward to socialist construction under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was thus convinced that the stage of revolution remained democratic to be achieved by a broad alliance of the proletariat and peasantry.

Around this time Vijay Singh began to examine the CPSU archives where he discovered important stenographic records and letters pertaining to the exchanges between the fractured leadership of the Indian communist movement and the leadership of CPSU headed by Stalin. These documents were collected, painstakingly translated, annotated and published in the journal over several years. They throw immense light on the internal debates within the CPI and the significant contributions of the CPSU to resolving them and pointing the way forward. The result of these conversations was the new programme of the CPI issued in 1951, the ‘Tactical line’ and ‘Policy statement’ of the same date. Vijay Singh took to energetically advocating this programme and engaged in widespread discussions with comrades of the Indian left.

The above discussions would make it clear why Vijay Singh was so interested in defending JV Stalin and his work and the USSR and CPSU, Comintern and Cominform under his leadership. For him deviating from the clear path enunciated by Stalin was the road to revisionism and the eventual liquidation of socialism not only in USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies but also the very socialist dream across the world. Therefore it was imperative to him to defend Stalin from all the calumnies and misrepresentations promoted by the imperialist, liberal and revisionist press. This was necessary both for clearing the name of Stalin but also unravel the revolutionary path advocated by him. The journal published a large number of such articles but always after careful evaluation of the authenticity of the information and fact checking.

It would be fair to record that Vijay Singh’s thought process and method was not without some weaknesses. Firstly, I think his historical method was very firmly rooted in documents, printed and archival materials. This Rankeian reliance on archives and documents gives us no doubt a very sound understanding of the issues but the fact remains that they do not represent the entire reality or even the actual complexities of life. Secondly he seldom applied his sound methods of analysis to contemporary world and its problems leaving it for others to do so. He almost assumed that basic parameters of conflicts remained constant from the 1950s. I think it is now all the more important for us to now use his methods and perspective to study the contemporary world.

The polemical style of Vijay Singh was unique in its own way. He did not try to denigrate or ridicule his opponents. Instead, he treated those he disagreed with, with utmost respect and dignity. He would merely try to demonstrate that the contention of the opponent was not factual or in consonance with the works of Marx, Engles, Lenin or Stalin. And in many cases he would show how the views of the opponents were more aligned to the several revisionist trends that arose in the course of the movement and had been subjected to criticism by the classical authorities. Such dignified polemic enabled him to continue to converse even when the disagreements were apparent.