Leninist Theory of Revolution and Social Psychology

A short book - some twenty thousand words in seven brief chapters - with a large ambition.

Boris Porshnev sets out to comb Lenin's scattered remarks on the moods, instincts, sentiments and frame of mind of the masses, and to show that taken together they amount to the foundations of a science: a Marxist social psychology of revolution.

Porshnev is worth reading in his own right, and it would be a mistake to take him for an apparatus functionary. Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev (1905-1972) was among the most original Soviet historians of his generation. His major work was on the popular uprisings of seventeenth-century France in the decades before the Fronde - a history written emphatically from below, attentive to the crowd, the riot and the collective temper - and it won him a Stalin Prize in 1950. He was also the effective founder of Soviet social psychology as a discipline, and the theorist of the "we"/"they" opposition as its bedrock category. By the end of his life he was a heterodox and somewhat isolated figure.

The results here are usable. He advances the materialist case that consciousness has a psychological substrate irreducible to doctrine; he recovers Plekhanov's mediating category of the "state of mood and morals" from the vulgarisers; and he reads the contagion and summation of mass feeling with the eye of a historian who had spent his life among crowds. A reader who wants a supple Marxist vocabulary for how a revolutionary mood gathers will find it here, better stated than in most of what the period produced.

Issued by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House in 1970.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.