Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism • Manual

The preface to this book does something the Short Course never did: it names the authors. The manual was prepared by a group led by O. V. Kuusinen, with Arbatov, Belyakov, Vygodsky, Mileikovsky and Sheydin, and revisions to individual chapters by Burlatsky, Ivanov, Leibzon, Makarovsky and Sitkovsky. It states plainly what the revision was for: the book has been "enriched by the valuable new ideas" of the Programme of the CPSU adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961, and by the conclusions of the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties of 1960. This is a commissioned textbook, revised to a specification, and it says so.

The man at the head of the list matters. Otto Wille Kuusinen was one of the leaders of the Finnish workers' revolution of January 1918; he fled to Soviet Russia when it was crushed, spent the interwar decades as a secretary of the Communist International, and - almost uniquely among the Comintern's foreign cadre - survived the years in which most of his colleagues were shot. By 1961 he sat on the Presidium and the Secretariat, one of the very few men alive who had known Lenin and now served Khrushchev. He is the connective tissue between the two regimes, and this book is the doctrine he was asked to write for the second.

That is its value. At some 950 pages it is the fullest single statement of post-Stalin Soviet Marxism-Leninism in English - philosophy, political economy, the theory of socialist revolution, the transition to communism - written to replace the Short Course and to carry the 1961 Programme's optimism into the classroom. Nothing else covers the same ground at the same length with the same authority.

English edition edited by Clemens Dutt. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.