A book that exists to establish that peaceful coexistence is Lenin's doctrine. It runs to some 92,000 words and cites Lenin's Collected Works eighty-one times.
That makes it the single most useful volume in English for anyone who wants to see how the doctrine was actually constructed, because Tomashevsky is scrupulous enough that his own footnotes let a reader test the claim. The institutional pedigree he assembles is long and seriously documented: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses, the 1960 and 1969 Moscow Meetings, the CPSU Programme, the Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Congresses, the Lenin Centenary Theses, and the statements of the fraternal parties. He also reports, in passing, the earliest attested use of the phrase itself, from Georgi Chicherin as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in June 1920.
The manuscript closed in the summer of 1973 and shows its seams. One passage still treats the Helsinki process as a matter of arrangements not yet made; another, written later, already celebrates the conference's beginnings. The book was assembled in layers and the layers were never reconciled. Neither Chile nor the October war appears, both falling after the text was finished - though Progress held the English for the better part of a year and printed it in 1974 without adding a line.
Read as the fullest available statement of Soviet foreign-policy doctrine at the high-water mark of detente, with its sources laid out to be checked, it is the standard text.
Translated by James Riordan.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which counts what the footnotes will and will not support.
