A Short History of the World, Volume II

The second and final volume of the Institute of History's history of the human race, carrying the story from the fall of the Russian monarchy to the moment of writing: the October Revolution and the civil war, the building of Soviet industry, the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the collapse of the colonial empires, the Cold War and the detente of the early 1970s.

It closes almost at the instant it went to press, with a footnote apologising that the Paris ceasefire of 27 January 1973 arrived too late to be worked into the text. There is no lag here at all: the Russian original and Vladimir Veizy's English are barely a year apart.

The contributors are again specialists of standing, and the chapters on the colonial and semi-colonial world - a full third of the book - are shared among the leading Soviet orientalists and Africanists of the day: Alexander Guber, whose name is printed in mourning rules after his death in 1971; Apollon Davidson, the pioneer of African studies in the USSR; Leonid Kutakov on Japan. The Soviet chapters are by Ilya Berkhin and by Alexander Chubaryan, later director of the Institute of General History.

That third of the book on decolonisation is the most valuable part, and the least constrained. A world history written in Moscow in 1973 could afford to be candid about the crimes of every ruling class on earth except one, and it is candid about almost all of them.

Volume Two of two.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on where the candour stops.