This book was written to answer letters. Its preface explains that readers abroad had shown a keen interest in the day-to-day workings of the Soviets, and that the numerous enquiries reaching Progress Publishers were what prompted the volume.
That fixes what kind of object it is. Not an internal polemic but an export primer: a patient, procedural, almost administrative account of how the Soviets of Working People's Deputies are elected, convened and run, written for the sympathetic foreign enquirer who wanted to know how the machinery actually worked. Constituencies and nomination, the conduct of elections, the standing commissions, the executive committees, the deputy's mandate and his obligations to those who elected him, the relation of local soviets to the republics and the Union.
It is a collective work with a named front man. V. M. Chkhikvadze, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences and director of its Institute of State and Law, directed the compilation; the contributors were specialists in Soviet state law - M. A. Shafir, Y. N. Umansky, B. V. Chernov, V. M. Koldayev and O. Y. Kutafin. Murad Saifulin edited it, as he edited the whole cluster of socialist-democracy titles for English readers.
The Russian title was blunter than the English one: the Soviets as organs of the people's rule. And for once the date is face value - a genuine document of 1972, leaning on the Twenty-Fourth Congress and citing the 1970 and 1971 elections as recent facts, with no older manuscript underneath.
Translated by James Riordan. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
