Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

Writing and Publication

Commissioned by Stalin in 1935, the text was drafted principally by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Pyotr Pospelov, and Vilhelm Knorin. Knorin was arrested during the Great Purge and executed in July 1938; the final manuscript was completed in daily Kremlin meetings involving Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. The text was serialized in Pravda from 9 to 19 September 1938, then published as a book at three rubles per copy.

Content and Ideology

The book presented Lenin and Stalin as the sole correct Bolshevik line, framing Party history as a struggle between this "correct" line and various "mistaken" deviations. Purged Old Bolsheviks like Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were recast as Mensheviks who had opposed Lenin from the start; the names of Yezhov and Goloshchyokin were expunged from later editions after their arrests. Chapter Four, "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism," written by Stalin personally, became the canonical Soviet philosophy text for decades.

Impact and Repudiation

A Central Committee resolution on 14 November 1938 made it mandatory in all universities and party schools, and it served as the template for all Soviet historiography. By Stalin's death it had gone through 301 editions in Russian alone, totaling 42.8 million copies. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev attacked it in his Secret Speech and Anastas Mikoyan openly denounced it for suffocating party historiography; it ceased publication immediately. It was replaced in 1962 by a new party history led by Boris Ponomarev.