The World Communist Movement

A doctrinal handbook for the world movement, produced by the office that actually ran relations with it.

The Russian original was written by a collective including V. V. Zagladin, then deputy chief of the Central Committee's department for relations with other Communist parties. This is not a work of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, still less of the Academy of Sciences. It is a product of the department that handled the fraternal parties, written for them, by one of the officials who handled them - which makes it an unusually direct statement of what Moscow wanted its allies to do.

Its occasion is stated openly: the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in June 1969, whose concluding Document is quoted on almost every second page, together with the Twenty-Fourth Congress and Brezhnev's Following Lenin's Course. That meeting was the last of its kind, convened after the Sino-Soviet rupture and a year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and its purpose was to reassert Moscow's authority over a movement that was visibly fragmenting. This book is the codification of its line, packaged for export.

Eleven chapters of strategy and tactics: the anti-monopoly alliance, the united and popular fronts, the peaceful road to power, work in the trade unions, work among women, work among Catholics, the national liberation movement, and the movement's own disputes. Its named opponents, in order of the space given them, are the leadership of the Chinese party, right-wing revisionism in the socialist countries, and what it calls neo-Trotskyism.

Translated by Julius Katzer.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on a history of the world movement that declines to narrate its own past.