A country-by-country survey of Southeast Asia at the moment of maximum heat: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, each treated in turn. It carries no editor's name and no list of contributors-a collective product of the Soviet Orientalist establishment, assembled for export. For once the spine is the date of the argument. The latest events recorded are from the middle of 1971: the three million tons of bombs dropped on Laos between May 1964 and August 1971, and the seven-point proposal introduced by Nguyen Thi Binh at the 119th session of the Paris talks on 1 July 1971. This was finished in late 1971 or early 1972-before the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, before the Paris Accords-at a point when the outcome in Indochina was still in the balance. Its purpose was double. Outward, it was ammunition: a documented indictment of American and colonial conduct in the region, for readers in the West and the non-aligned world, and the documentation is real. Inward, it was a demonstration that the Soviet model of anti-colonial advance worked. The theory organising every chapter is rarely named but never absent-the doctrine of the national-liberation movement and the non-capitalist path, in which the national-democratic revolution comes first, in a bloc with the progressive bourgeoisie, and the socialist revolution is posed only later. The Burma chapter shows most clearly what that meant in practice, presenting the army's seizure of power in March 1962-which the text concedes the people took no part in-as a step onto a new road of development. Translated by David Fidlon. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
