The Dynamic Twentieth Century

The book opens on a boast, and everything in it is built on that boast. "The past decades of the 20th century," Khachik Momjan begins, "were the most revolutionary in man's history." Fifty years earlier, he writes, "the system of capitalist enterprise ruled undivided" and socialism "dwelled modestly between the covers of books"; now "the world socialist system embraces more than one-third of mankind". The century is read as a single ascending arc, from the covers of books to a third of the earth, and the reader is invited to stand at its summit and look back down the slope.

That summit has a date. This is a book of the fiftieth anniversary of October - the phrase "fifty years ago" tolls through its opening pages - written in about 1967, its latest datable material the industrial output of 1966 and a strike-statistics series running to the same year. Progress Publishers issued it in English, in Vic Schneierson's translation, in 1968.

Momjan was an able philosopher and the book is a clean, well-made specimen of its kind: the philosophy of history as the Soviet Union taught it at the confident noon of the Brezhnev settlement, when the Khrushchev succession had been resolved, the worst of destalinisation wound down, and the state was preparing to celebrate half a century. Its argument is that history moves by objective law rather than by the deeds of individuals, and it makes that case at length and with genuine learning - including a sharp critique of Carlyle's cult of great personalities.

Translated by Vic Schneierson. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.