This is not a book of history but a book of devotion, and that is exactly what makes it useful.Lenin in Our Life was issued by Progress Publishers in 1967, the fiftieth year of the October Revolution, and it belongs to that jubilee as surely as a wreath belongs to a monument. It collects eighteen short reminiscence-pieces by Soviet writers, artists and scientists - Lydia Zhak on Gorky, Alexander Deich on Lunacharsky, the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, the cosmonaut chronicler Yevgeny Ry...

This is a book that keeps score.Its dust jacket explains the commission: among the letters reaching Progress Publishers, "one recurring request" was for a book setting out "the present balance of power in the world", the direction of the economic competition between the two systems, and "what has the future in store for mankind". This volume was "intended to fill that need". It is a balance-sheet of the contest Khrushchev had staked the Soviet future on, and that the Party Programm...

The doctrine itself, in its fullest teaching form.Prepared by a large collective of the USSR Academy of Sciences under Academician A. M. Rumyantsev, this is the canonical Soviet textbook of political economy - described in its own closing note as a systematic course in the political economy of capitalism and socialism, intended for students and social-science lecturers. More people learned what the Soviet state meant by Marxist economics through this exposition than through any oth...

The book on this list that comes closest to doing honest work against Western economics, and the usual charge does not stick.Irina Osadchaya does not condemn Keynes from a safe distance or relay his arguments at second hand. She reads him in the original, follows the neo-Keynesians and the post-Keynesians through their actual models, tracks Friedman's monetarist counter-attack equation by equation, and arrives at a diagnosis of the crisis of Keynesian policy that events had already...

The last full-dress statement of the CPSU's doctrine of the world revolutionary process before the ground moved under it.Yuri Krasin was a senior theorist of the Soviet party-academic establishment and a specialist in Lenin's theory of revolution who had spent a career on exactly these questions. This is not reportage, and not polemic in the manner of the anti-Trotsky pamphlets appearing in the same years; it is the general theory those books presuppose - an attempt to state, at th...

A book about efficiency by a man who had spent his working life inside the machinery of Soviet planning, written at the moment that machinery began unmistakably to run down.S. A. Heinman was a professor and leading researcher at the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and a specialist in the economics of technical progress - one of the technicians of growth rather than one of its priests. Where the companion volume on this theme spoke in sixteen voices, this spe...

A short, densely footnoted account of how the American arms establishment acquired its grip on Washington - the committee system, the procurement scandals, the propaganda apparatus, and the doctrines from containment to the Guam Doctrine - built almost entirely out of American sources.Its hundred and seven notes cite C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger, Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Maxwell Taylor, Herman Kahn, Ralph Lapp, Hanson Baldwin, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, the Pentagon...

The author had been dead for six years when this appeared in English, and the preface says so on its first line.Georgy Frantsov (1903-1969) was not a scholar working under constraint. He was one of the people who decided what the constraint was. The preface lists the offices: Director of the Institute of International Relations, head of the Press Department of the USSR Foreign Ministry, Rector of the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee, Editor-in-Chief of World M...

Most Soviet books written against Mao fought on political ground: the Cultural Revolution, the trade unions, the border, the Ninth Congress. This one picks a harder fight. Its charge is not that Mao's policy was wrong but that his philosophy was never Marxist at all - that the vocabulary was borrowed and the content underneath it was something else.Unusually for the genre, the volume says exactly who wrote what, assigning nine named contributors to their sections: V. G. Georgiyev a...

A collective volume by the two elite research institutes of the late Soviet state - the Institute of World Economy and International Relations and the Institute of the United States and Canada - on where capitalism stood as the century closed.Fifteen chapters and some 171,000 words, described on the jacket as the work of well-known Soviet economists, philosophers, historians, sociologists and journalists. The footnotes identify the milieu precisely even though no contributor list s...

[Teach Yourself] Marx - the Key Ideas will quickly familiarize you with the revolutionary thinking of this great man. It will take you through all the essential concepts - from class struggle to dialectical materialism. Expressing Marx's sometimes complex ideas in simple terms, and backed up with references to his own texts, this book gives you everything you need to know.NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.A...

A new biography of Karl Marx, tracing the life of this titanic figure and the legacy of his workKarl Marx remains the most influential and controversial political thinker in history. He died quietly in 1883 and a mere eleven mourners attended his funeral, but a year later he was being hailed as "the Prophet himself" whose name and writings would "endure through the ages." He has been viewed as a philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, ev...