A two-hundred-year history of the Democratic and Republican parties, from the Federalists and Jeffersonians to Reagan's second term, by a collective of Moscow University Americanists. This is the Sivachev and Yazkov school of Soviet Americanistics - the most professional wing of Soviet scholarship on the United States, whose members read the American sources in the original and cited them by page. The jacket describes the contributors as experts at Moscow University and institutes of the Academy of Sciences, working in a series sponsored by the university's Scientific Coordinating Council. The apparatus bears that out. Across the book they quote James MacGregor Burns, Henry Steele Commager, Clinton Rossiter, Barry Goldwater, Robert Taft, Walter Dean Burnham, the collected works of Lincoln and Jefferson, the party platforms and the Congressional Quarterly, alongside their own Soviet monographs. Whatever else one makes of it, the book reads what it argues against, in the original. Its thesis - that the two parties have functioned as an alternating mechanism for managing conflict within a single propertied consensus, and that the third-party tradition has been repeatedly absorbed or crushed - is argued rather than asserted, and much of it would be recognised by American scholars of the realignment literature. The date is real. The concluding chapter reaches the 1986 midterms, the Iran-Contra affair, the currency upheavals of autumn 1987 and the Washington summit of that December. Translated by Sergei Sossinsky. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
