Leninism and Contemporary Problems of the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

The name on the spine was, in 1972, among the most consequential in the international communist apparatus, and almost unknown outside it. Konstantin Zarodov was editor-in-chief of Problems of Peace and Socialism, the theoretical monthly published in Prague and circulated in English as World Marxist Review: Moscow's central organ for co-ordinating the world's non-ruling Communist parties. He had been installed in that chair in 1968, the year Warsaw Pact tanks entered the city where his journal was printed.

The book shows his position on almost every page. Its statistics are computed from material published in World Marxist Review; its author reports conversations with the journal's representatives, with French Communist officials, with Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. This is not a scholar's monograph assembled in a library. It is the considered doctrine of the man Moscow had put in charge of telling the world's Communists what Leninism required of them.

Its subject is the general laws and the national peculiarities of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and its purpose is to fix what a Communist party may and may not do with the theory of that transition. The doctrine is stated precisely: there are general laws binding on all countries taking the socialist road, and first among those operating in the political sphere is the leadership of the working masses by the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party. Deviation consists in overestimating the peculiarities of individual countries. The leading role of the party is presented not as a tactical necessity of Russian conditions nor as a stage to be passed through, but as a general law of socialism as such.

Written in 1971 and issued at the moment of normalisation in Czechoslovakia, it is the theoretical settlement of accounts after Prague.

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