Recent History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 1918-1939, Volume One

A scholarly history of the American working class between 1918 and 1939, nineteen chapters and some hundred and eighty thousand words, produced under the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences by a team of Soviet Americanists - G. N. Sevostyanov writing the preface, with chapters by I. M. Krasnov, Y. F. Yazkov, V. L. Malkov, N. V. Sivachyov, N. V. Kurkov, B. Y. Mikhailov and S. M. Askoldova.

Its bibliography runs to hundreds of American titles, and the authors worked from the American union press and the American secondary literature at first hand. Its polemical target is named in the preface: American historians who held that the Marxist account of class and class struggle simply did not apply to the United States - the theory of consensus, and the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Against them the book sets out to show that the United States was riven by class conflict its own academy would not describe, and it documents that well. Soviet labour history had one structural advantage over much of what American departments were producing at the same date: it assumed class conflict was the organising fact of American life and went looking for it. The result is a detailed narrative of the 1919 strike wave, the open-shop drive, the company unions, the Depression, the rise of the CIO and the sit-downs.

The organising premise is stated in the preface - that the history of the class is inseparable from the history of its vanguard party - and that premise governs what the book can and cannot record.

Volume One of two.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.