The International Working-Class Movement

Volume Two runs from the Paris Commune to the eve of the first Russian revolution - the workers' movement in the period of transition to imperialism, 1871 to 1904.

At 273,000 words it is not a collection but a continuous, jointly written history, with a basic team of eighteen named authors, a further twenty or so who supplied data, and an editorial board of six under V. V. Zagladin as editor-in-chief.

Its subject is the Commune and its suppression, the last years of the First International, the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany, the founding of the Second International, the Bernstein debate, the Millerand affair, the growth of trade unions and cooperatives and of women's and youth organisations, the first proletariats of Latin America, Asia and Africa, and - for about a third of its length - Russia, Iskra and the Second Congress of the RSDLP.

That comparative reach is what makes it useful. Few histories of the Second International period attempt to hold the German, French, British, American, Russian and colonial movements in one frame, decade by decade, with this weight of documentation behind them.

The text is of about 1977, reaching English readers four years later: the latest secondary work cited is of 1976, and the last events named are the Twenty-Fifth Congress of February 1976 and the Berlin conference of European communist parties that June.

Volume Two. Translated by David Skvirsky.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.