Marxist-Leninist Philosophy

The standard academic statement of Soviet philosophical doctrine in the late Brezhnev years, set out systematically and at length: matter and consciousness, the theory of knowledge, the laws and categories of dialectics, and the historical-materialist account of society, class and the state.

A. P. Sheptulin wrote for students and teachers of the subject, and the book does what a serious textbook should - it defines its terms, states its positions in order, and takes the reader through the categories one at a time rather than gesturing at them. For anyone who wants to know what dialectical and historical materialism actually consisted of as a taught body of doctrine, rather than as a slogan, this is among the clearest expositions available in English.

It also has an unusual documentary value. Progress issued it twice, in 1978 and again in 1980, and the two printings have been collated line by line for this edition. Between them fall the invasion of Afghanistan, the internal exile of Sakharov, and the strike wave in the Baltic shipyards that produced Solidarity. Not a sentence was added, cut or reworded. The apparent differences between the two files turn out to be scanning artefacts - running heads counted as text, footnotes migrating across differently set pages, and optical noise. Stripped of those, the texts differ by about a quarter of one per cent, none of it substantive.

Official philosophy, in other words, registered none of it. That absence is a more interesting finding than a revision would have been.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.