Problems of the Communist Movement

A survey of the world communist movement's difficulties, issued first in 1975 and then revised and supplemented for a second printing.

Its subject is the strategic questions facing the non-ruling parties: the anti-monopoly alliance, the relation between democratic and socialist demands, the united front, the struggle in the trade unions, the national liberation movements, and the movement's own internal disputes. Around a hundred and fifteen thousand words, it is one of the fuller Soviet statements of the period.

The revision is real and datable, which is what makes the volume useful as a specimen. The new foreword announces that the edition has been revised to take account of more recent events, reports that communist parties are active in ninety-four countries, and lists what the revisers had in mind - the Portuguese revolution, the Iranian upheaval, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. Statistical series are carried forward to 1977 and 1978; there is discussion of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, of the Trilateral Commission's 1978 membership, and of Carter's third energy programme of July 1979. The most recent hard datum is a strike count for the first four months of 1979.

Over that sits a thin coat of the following decade: Brezhnev's report to the Twenty-Sixth Congress cited four times, and the Central Committee resolution on Lenin's 110th anniversary once.

So the substance was brought up to mid-1979 and the later element consists of new footnotes to a new speech.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which counts what the revision found room for and what it did not.