The International Working-Class Movement

The volume of the seven that had to cross the 1930s, and the way it crosses them is the whole story.

Its Russian subtitle names its two subjects - builder of socialism, fighter against fascism - and between them lie the years a Soviet history of the world workers' movement could confront or could not: the defeat of the oppositions, forced collectivisation and the famine of 1932-33, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front and the Spanish war, and the Moscow Trials and the Terror.

It is a genuinely large collective work. The Institute of the International Working-Class Movement put some sixty named historians to it, a basic team of authors with a further sixty-odd contributors, each holding a candidate's or doctor's degree, under an editorial board headed by S. S. Salychev - whose name, like several others on the board, is printed inside the black mourning rules that mark a man who died before his book appeared.

On the Popular Front, the Spanish war, the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s and the wartime resistance across occupied Europe, the documentation is heavy and the detail is available nowhere else in English at this length.

The Russian text closed in 1981, in the last full year of Brezhnev, and reached English readers four years later with nothing altered. It is a document of the Brezhnev settlement on the past rather than of the year it was printed in.

Volume Five.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.