Soviet Socialist Democracy

The date on the title page is the first thing to notice, and the last thing its authors would have wanted noticed.

Soviet Socialist Democracy - a collective work by three Soviet authors, edited by M. Saifulin - appeared from Progress Publishers in 1968. That was the year in which the phrase "socialism with a human face" entered the world's political vocabulary from Prague, and the year in which, on the night of 20-21 August, half a million Warsaw Pact troops crossed the Czechoslovak frontier to end the experiment that produced it. A book about socialist democracy could hardly have appeared at a more exposed moment.

Internal evidence dates the writing precisely. The preface opens on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in November 1967; the most recent Party gathering discussed is the Twenty-Third Congress of 1966; the statistical series run to 1966; the current plan is 1966-70. Nothing in it postdates the winter of 1967-68, and the figures for 1970 that appear in these pages are targets under the plan then running, not reports.

Its value is that of a complete official statement. This is how the Soviet state described its own democracy - the soviets and their elections, the role of the Party, the trade unions and mass organisations, the rights set out in the constitution and the machinery said to guarantee them - at the precise moment when that description became untenable. Nothing else in English sets it out at this length with this authority.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.