A Short History of the World, Volume I

The most ambitious thing on this list: a single condensed history of the entire human race, compressed by the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences into two volumes. This is the first, carrying the story from the first stone tools to the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917 - Egypt and Sumer, Greece and Rome, medieval Europe and China and the Arab lands, the discovery of America, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune.

It is the work of a committee of genuine specialists, and they were good ones. The contributors include Milica Nechkina, the leading Soviet authority on the Decembrists and the Russian revolutionary movement; Sergei Skazkin, a distinguished medievalist; the orientalist Alexander Guber; Sergei Utchenko, a serious historian of the Roman Republic; and, presiding over the whole, Albert Manfred, the outstanding Soviet historian of France, of the Revolution and of Napoleon. When the book reaches the French Revolution it is very good indeed, and that is no accident - it is Manfred's own subject, written by the man who knew it best.

The framework is the settled historical materialism of the post-Stalin Soviet academy: the five socio-economic formations as the fixed skeleton of all human history, treated not as an interpretation to be argued but as established law. The preface states the programme without embarrassment, listing among the questions the book will answer why the final victory of communism is inevitable.

A world history with the meaning already marked on the map, written by scholars who knew their material better than the frame allowed.

Volume One of two. Translated by Katharine Judelson.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.