History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union / Bolsheviks /

The title page of this book names no author. It says: "EDITED BY A COMMISSION OF THE C.C. OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.)" and, below that, "AUTHORIZED BY THE C.C. OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.) 1938". That is the whole attribution, and it is the most honest sentence in the volume. This is not a history written by historians and then approved. It is a decision of a governing body, issued in the form of a history.

That is exactly why it is worth having. The Short Course is the single most important document of Stalinism as a system of belief - the text through which two generations across a third of the world learned what had happened to them and what they were part of. It was serialised in Pravda in September 1938 and published as a book immediately afterwards; the English edition followed in 1939 and is the text reprinted here. Its drafting was done principally by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and Pyotr Pospelov under editorial control that Stalin exercised personally and heavily, and the philosophical section of Chapter Four, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", is his own composition, later reprinted under his name. In November 1938 a Central Committee decree made it the single authorised textbook of party history, displacing every other account - including several by Yaroslavsky himself.

What followed was probably the largest print run of any political text of the twentieth century, something in the region of forty million copies in the Soviet Union alone before Stalin's death. No serious account of the period can be written without it, and it has been out of easy reach in English for decades.

It was quietly withdrawn after 1956.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which reads it as what its own title page says it is.