Triumph of Lenin's Ideas

This is not a book. It is a ceremony, set in type.

Behind the title stands the stenographic record of a state occasion: the International Scientific Conference on the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, held in Moscow from 10 to 12 November 1977 under the joint auspices of the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Higher Party School. The editorial board - P. N. Fedoseyev, A. G. Yegorov, M. T. Iovchuk and E. M. Chekharin - were masters of ceremonies rather than authors.

What lies between the covers is a succession of speeches, opened by Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo's grey cardinal of ideology, and delivered in turn by Boris Ponomarev, by Gus Hall of the American party, by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez of Cuba, by Luis Corvalan of Chile, and by two dozen leaders of the fraternal parties. To read it is to sit in the hall.

For once the date of the book and the date of the thought are the same. Everything in it turns on two events barely a month old: the adoption of the new Soviet Constitution on 7 October 1977 and Brezhnev's anniversary report. That precision is a gift, because it lets the volume's confidence be read against the calendar. This is the sound of the regime at the top of its voice at the exact moment the deceleration set in - growth rates falling, the leadership ageing into the gerontocracy that would bury three general secretaries in twenty-eight months, and the invasion that would shatter the detente being celebrated two years away and wholly unforeseen.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.