The International Working-Class Movement

The longest volume in the series at some 296,000 words, covering twelve years: from the Russian revolution of 1905 to February 1917, stopping deliberately a few weeks short of Lenin's return to the Finland Station.

It is the work of about forty named historians of the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, with an editorial board of five under S. S. Khromov and a statistical team of four, above them the same general editorial committee that signed the first volume.

The span is the crisis of the Second International, and the volume covers it in more detail than any comparable English-language work: the aftermath of 1905 across Europe, the mass strike debate, the Balkan wars, the Basel congress, the collapse of August 1914 and the votes for war credits, Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the wartime splits in the German, French and British movements, the labour movements of the United States and the colonial world, and the February revolution.

The documentation is heavy and the research base wide, which is what makes it useful whatever one makes of the frame - and the frame is unmistakable, since a single word of judgement does much of the analytical work throughout.

The Russian text was finished in 1978, at the last confident moment of detente, and reached English readers in 1983, the year of the Euromissile deployments. The book knows nothing of that.

Volume Three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.