LENIN about the press

A substantial Lenin reader on the press, the newspaper and the journalist's trade: what a party paper is for, how it should be organised and financed, what it may print, and what the state should do about publishing. Some 483 pages of it, drawn from the forty-five-volume Collected Works, with a supplement of early Soviet decrees on the press.

It is worth being exact about where it came from, because the imprint is not what the catalogue says. This is a Prague book, published by the International Organization of Journalists and printed at the Svoboda works. The Publishers' Note explains that it was prepared by the Union of Soviet Journalists and the Union of German Journalists of the GDR at the IOJ's request, and names an editorial board of six with three Soviet compilers and an English-edition compiler. Progress Publishers appears once, as the source of the translations.

The compilation is thorough and well ordered, and its fourth section is titled "Freedom of the Press". That is the part a modern reader will come for, and it cannot be read apart from the room it was printed in. In April 1972, in the same city, the reconstituted Union of Czech Journalists told its convention that more than 1,200 journalists in the Czech lands had been dismissed since the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968; with the Slovak figures, the total approached half of everyone working in the profession at the time the armies arrived. Most were not permitted to return to it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which sets the volume against the purge going on around it.