The book in which the Soviet state set down, in one place and for export, its official theory of world revolution.
Its organising idea is the world revolutionary process, in which the revolution of the age has three great forces: the world socialist system built around the USSR, the working-class movement of the developed capitalist countries, and the national-liberation movement of the former colonies. The three are to be welded into a single stream, and the book is explicit about which of them commands - the socialist community is the bastion and vanguard, and the other two detachments are measured by their alliance with it.
From this follow its characteristic doctrines. The non-capitalist path of development offers newly liberated states a route to socialism by leaning on the socialist camp rather than passing through a full capitalist stage - the phrase recurs some fifty times. Peaceful coexistence governs relations between the two world systems, appearing forty-four times as the principle that lets socialism build in security while the class struggle continues by other means. And the whole is bounded by a firm repudiation of the export of revolution: revolution cannot be accelerated, made to order, or pushed from outside.
No one signs it. It names Marx, Engels and Lenin on every page and its own author nowhere, speaking in the first-person plural of the Party and locating its authority in congress decisions - the Twenty-Second Congress Programme, the documents of the Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth, and the international meetings of 1957, 1960 and 1969.
There is no lag: written at the high tide of detente, in the run-up to Helsinki.
Translated by James Riordan. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
