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 the level of principle, the laws governing revolution in the second half of the twentieth century.
Eleven essays work the architecture rather than any particular region: the relation between the three detachments of the world movement, the forms of transition to socialism, the place of the national liberation struggle, the peaceful and non-peaceful roads, the role of the party, and the strategy of alliances. The commission was to give the international movement its map of the whole - how the pieces fit together, and who moves them.
It was finished before the year on its spine. Nothing in it knows that Chernenko would die in March 1985, that his successor would within weeks begin talking about acceleration and then restructuring, or that the Twenty-Seventh Congress would revise the very vocabulary it treats as settled. The latest congress cited is the Twenty-Sixth of 1981, quoted a dozen times as current.
A summing-up delivered on the eve of the event that would test it, with the serene confidence of a doctrine that does not yet know.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
