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This book announces its purpose in a subtitle the English edition drops. The Russian title page reads Socialism and Democracy: A Reply to Opportunists, and the running head repeats the second half on every page.
It is a polemic and never pretends otherwise, which makes it more useful than the surveys. Where a descriptive volume sets out the machinery of soviets and elections, this one has chosen an enemy and undertaken to win an argument on the merits-and the enemy is internal. The opponents are the reform communists of the bloc and the Western parties arguing for pluralism, a multi-party system and a parliamentary road, in the years after Prague when those arguments were live and spreading.
Boris Topornin was a serious Soviet jurist-one of the footnotes here cites his own article on socialism and a multi-party system in the flagship journal of the Soviet legal profession-and the constitutional and institutional chapters carry his hand. The book everywhere assumes the developed socialism doctrine of the Twenty-Fourth Congress, and it reaches for the fraternal parties as witnesses: Honecker at the Eighth Congress of the SUPG, Kadar's report to the Tenth Hungarian Congress.
Its central category is democracy understood as real popular power rather than formal right. Read as the fullest statement of the case Moscow put against its own reformers, with the argument made rather than merely asserted, it is the standard text.
Translated by Nicholas Bobrov, edited by Murad Saifulin.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which asks whether the book's own definition is ever pointed homeward.
It is a polemic and never pretends otherwise, which makes it more useful than the surveys. Where a descriptive volume sets out the machinery of soviets and elections, this one has chosen an enemy and undertaken to win an argument on the merits-and the enemy is internal. The opponents are the reform communists of the bloc and the Western parties arguing for pluralism, a multi-party system and a parliamentary road, in the years after Prague when those arguments were live and spreading.
Boris Topornin was a serious Soviet jurist-one of the footnotes here cites his own article on socialism and a multi-party system in the flagship journal of the Soviet legal profession-and the constitutional and institutional chapters carry his hand. The book everywhere assumes the developed socialism doctrine of the Twenty-Fourth Congress, and it reaches for the fraternal parties as witnesses: Honecker at the Eighth Congress of the SUPG, Kadar's report to the Tenth Hungarian Congress.
Its central category is democracy understood as real popular power rather than formal right. Read as the fullest statement of the case Moscow put against its own reformers, with the argument made rather than merely asserted, it is the standard text.
Translated by Nicholas Bobrov, edited by Murad Saifulin.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which asks whether the book's own definition is ever pointed homeward.