History of the USSR, Part II

This is the volume where the account falls due. Part One stopped on 3 March 1917; this one covers, in its own words, almost a quarter of a century from the triumph of the October Revolution to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

October, Brest-Litovsk, the Civil War, Kronstadt, Lenin's last writings, the Left Opposition, collectivisation, the famine years, 1937 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact are all inside its covers, which makes it the most testing volume of the three and the most interesting to read closely.

Like Part One it is signed, and the foreword assigns the chapters: A. P. Nenarokov on the revolution; Yu. I. Korablev and A. P. Shurygin on the civil war; D. A. Kovalenko heading the group for the following chapters; V. A. Kumanev on culture; the agricultural sections of the 1930s to N. A. Ivnitsky; and foreign policy to A. O. Chubaryan and I. S. Kremer.

Ivnitsky's presence matters. He was, and remained, the outstanding Soviet archival historian of dekulakisation, and it shows in those pages. The case against the book is not that it is stupid.

What Progress sold in 1981 was a mid-Brezhnev text prepared a year before the sixtieth anniversary of October - the settled post-Khrushchev version, no longer arguing about Stalin and not intending to reopen the question.

Part Two of three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which follows one committee through the insurrection and notes who is never named as its chairman.