Lenin: The Great Theoretician

The first printing is dated 1970, and for once the date is the whole point. This is a centenary book, manufactured for the hundredth anniversary of Lenin's birth.

To understand what it is, you have to understand what April 1970 was in the Soviet Union: not a scholarly occasion but a liturgical one, the high noon of the official Lenin cult, planned years in advance. The centenary was among the largest ideological mobilisations the Soviet state ever mounted - a special decree of the Central Committee, medals struck, cities renamed, a wave of monuments, and a torrent of print in which volumes exactly like this one were commissioned by the score.

Fourteen contributors march in step through philosophy, economics, the state, the party and the national question, with P. N. Fedoseyev's opening essay quoting the document that set the key: the Address adopted by the Moscow Meeting of the Communist and Workers' Parties in 1969. That provenance tells you the audience. The book was written for export, to be read by the fraternal parties whose delegates had gathered in Moscow the year before, at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, when Peking was claiming Lenin's mantle for itself and the Western parties were beginning to loosen.

Its value is as the most systematic exposition ever assembled of the official Leninism - what the Soviet state, at the peak of its confidence and with every resource of its academy, wanted the world to understand Lenin had taught. Nothing else states that position at this length or with this authority.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.