Caution: Zionism!

A warning is owed before anything else: this is an antisemitic tract, and this edition reprints it as evidence, with an introduction that says so plainly and at length.

Caution: Zionism! is one of the founding texts of the campaign the Soviet state launched after the Six-Day War of June 1967 under the banner of anti-Zionism. Under cover of anti-imperialism it constructs a conspiracy theory - an invisible transnational power, an "international Zionist concern" run "from a single centre", directing governments, intelligence services and stock exchanges from the shadows. That is not a political analysis of a political movement. It is the myth of a secret world Jewish power, refitted in Marxist vocabulary and issued by a state publishing house.

It is reprinted here because the campaign it belongs to mattered, is documented mainly through texts like this one, and is still argued about. Yuri Ivanov's book was the template: translated, exported, and echoed across the bloc for two decades. Anyone studying Soviet policy after 1967, the history of antisemitism in its "anti-Zionist" form, or the long afterlife of conspiracy thinking on the left will need the primary text, and it has been difficult to obtain in English.

The text also dates itself more precisely than its spine does. Its concluding chapter is signed August 1968 - the month Warsaw Pact tanks entered Prague - with later passages updated for the English edition into the spring of 1970.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which sets out exactly what the book does, distinguishes criticism of Zionism from the hatred this volume teaches, and refuses the excuse the title offers.