Fundamentals of Political Science

A primer is a revealing thing to hold up to the light, because it must tell the beginner where power lies.

This one was written for exactly that beginner, and it sets out lucidly and at length to explain the state, class rule, democracy, the party and the world political process. What makes it worth having is who wrote it. The title page credits a group of authors headed by A. N. Yakovlev and including S. I. Beglov, N. B. Bikkenin, K. N. Brutents and V. V. Zagladin. These were not academics working at a distance from power. Zagladin was a deputy head of the International Department of the Central Committee; Brutents worked in the same department; Bikkenin belonged to the ideological apparatus and later edited Kommunist, the Party's theoretical journal.

The senior name carries the sharpest irony in the whole catalogue. Aleksandr Yakovlev, then among the most powerful figures in the CPSU's propaganda machinery, is the same Yakovlev who returned a decade later from a long ambassadorial posting to become Gorbachev's closest ideological lieutenant - the architect of glasnost and perestroika, and the official who did more than any other to dismantle the ideological monopoly this book was written to defend. In 1975 he headed the team telling Soviet beginners that the Party's leading role guaranteed everything; within fifteen years he was arguing it was the obstacle to everything.

The date is genuine: the latest events cited are the Supreme Soviet elections of June 1974 and the recession that broke out that year.

Translated by David Fidlon. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.