Fundamentals of Scientific Socialism

Not export literature for a curious browser but a teaching manual for the cadres of the world movement, and it says so plainly in its closing pages, where the reader is told to apply what he has learned to the concrete situation in his own country and region.

The authors are a team of the Moscow Institute of Social Sciences headed by Professor G. P. Chernikov, and the institute is the fact that explains the book. It was not an ordinary academy but the Central Committee's school for foreign Communists, descended from the International Lenin School of the Comintern years, where cadres of the world's Communist and workers' parties came to Moscow to be trained.

So this is the elementary catechism as actually taught to those cadres: the theory of the socialist revolution, the world socialist system, the general crisis of capitalism, the national liberation movement, the party and its role, and the transition to communism.

For once the spine is nearly honest about the text. The argument runs up through the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 and a Gorbachev statement of 28 February 1987 and stops there, so this is a primer completed in the first months of 1987.

That date is the whole drama of the book. It teaches the invincibility of the world socialist system with the assurance of an ascendant creed, and it was published three years before that system dissolved.

Translated by Gayane Chalyan.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.