Leninism and the World Revolutionary Working-Class Movement

A book written for a single day: 22 April 1970, the centenary of Lenin's birth. The Russian edition appeared on the anniversary; this English translation followed a year later, by which time it had been overtaken by its own cast - Walter Ulbricht, whose chapter is signed as First Secretary of the SED, was removed from that post in May 1971.

It is two books bound as one, and they should be read apart. Part One is some 110 pages of signed political statement by four men speaking in their official capacities: M. A. Suslov for the CPSU Politburo, Waldeck Rochet for the French Communist Party, Ulbricht for the SED, Gus Hall for the CPUSA. Part Two is around 360 pages of anonymous institute monograph, produced for the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement of the Academy of Sciences and announced as the first title in a series under the heading International Working Class. The signatures are the warrant; the monograph is the book, and it is much the more interesting half.

Its value is documentary and precise. This is the official Soviet account of the world communist movement at the moment of the 1969 Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, which it invokes some sixty times as the settled frame of everything that follows: the Comintern narrated congress by congress from 1919 to 1943, the ruling parties, the non-ruling parties, the national liberation movements, and the rival tendencies the Soviet party was contending with. Nothing else states that position at this length, in English, from inside the institute that produced it.

Edited by Y. Kuskov, A. Rumyantsev and T. Timofeyev. Translated by David Skvirsky.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which tests the volume's quotations against their sources.